Episode 080
In this episode of the Product Voices podcast, we speak with Yasmin Kothari, the product director for Bumble for Friends. Bumble for Friends is an app designed to connect people nearby who share similar interests and friendship goals. It provides a convenient way to expand your friendship circle, with features like group conversations and a 72-hour response window. Yasmin shares insights on building meaningful connections through technology and excelling in product management. Download Bumble for Friends and join us in combatting loneliness with technology.
CONNECT & FURTHER RESOURCES:
Connect with Yasmin and Bumble BFF:
Other podcasts with Yasmin:
This is Product Management podcast - https://open.spotify.com/episode/17TL2cUE1GsGsJFkWwmpew
Fireart Studios podcast: Spotify (http://bit.ly/3mgi3WN) or Apple Podcasts (http://bit.ly/3ZGDmyv)
Bumble For Friends general articles:
Show Notes:
Chapters
0:00:03 Introduction to Product Voices Podcast 0:00:36 Introduction to Product Voices and the topic of building connections 0:04:17 Yasmin's career vision statement and joining Bumble for Friends 0:07:47 The importance of making products that connect with people 0:10:06 The Impact of Loneliness and Bumble's Solution 0:14:19 Fostering Inclusion and Welcoming Everyone on Bumble for Friends 0:19:44 Tailoring the product for friendship and community building 0:22:18 Philosophy of product leadership: Product, Process, and People 0:24:11 The importance of designing the right process for efficiency 0:26:16 Get close to the user and become an expert on their needs 0:28:11 Balancing parenthood and work, advice for new parents 0:30:16 Building Meaningful Connections: Bumble for Friends
Long Summary
In this episode of the Product Voices podcast, we explore the topic of building a product that connects people. Our guest, Yasmin Kothari, joins us to share her insights as the product director for Bumble for Friends, Bumble's friendship-finding app. Yasmin's background includes experience at McKinsey and working with nonprofits in India and Rwanda. She discusses her product roles at PayPal, Airbnb, and a startup, emphasizing her interest in using technology to create meaningful connections. Now at Bumble, she is dedicated to building kind connections for people and combating the loneliness epidemic. At Bumble, our mission is to utilize technology to help people make meaningful relationships online that translate into real-world connections. We recognize that loneliness is a serious issue, and through Bumble for Friends, we aim to address this problem. This app is designed to connect people nearby who share similar interests and friendship goals. By swiping through profiles, users can learn more about potential friends and common interests. It's an inclusive and welcoming environment, allowing users to express their authentic selves through various tags and metadata. Bumble for Friends provides a convenient way to expand your friendship circle. When two people swipe on each other, they can initiate a conversation and even have group conversations by adding multiple matches to one chat. The app eliminates the uncertainty of approaching strangers and creates a space where everyone is actively seeking new friends. We have made updates based on user feedback, including launching a standalone app for friendship and introducing features like group meetups. Building an app for friendship has its similarities to a dating app, but we also consider the unique aspects of platonic relationships. In terms of functionality, Bumble for Friends has a 72-hour response window to better align with the intentions of the community, recognizing that friendship interactions are not as daily as dating interactions. This product is particularly useful for young people who are moving to new cities for work, as it helps them establish social connections and create a supportive office environment. We believe that focusing on product, process, and people is key to successful product leadership. Balancing parenthood and work requires building a strong support network, leveraging efficiency life hacks, and practicing grace and empathy towards oneself. To excel in product management, it's recommended to gain experience in roles that allow you to understand user needs and partner with product teams to solve customer problems. This can be achieved through roles such as customer service, sales, data analysis, or user research. By becoming an expert on user needs, one can eventually transition into product management. The conversation concludes with a recommendation to download Bumble for Friends and a heartfelt thank you to our guest, Yasmin Kothari.
Brief Summary
In this episode of the Product Voices podcast, we speak with Yasmin Kothari, the product director for Bumble for Friends. Bumble for Friends is an app designed to connect people nearby who share similar interests and friendship goals. It provides a convenient way to expand your friendship circle, with features like group conversations and a 72-hour response window. Yasmin shares insights on building meaningful connections through technology and excelling in product management. Download Bumble for Friends and join us in combatting loneliness with technology.
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction to Product Voices Podcast
[0:03] Welcome to Product Voices, a podcast where we share valuable insights and useful resources to help us all be great in product management.
Visit the show's website to access the resources discussed on the show, find more information on our fabulous guests, or to submit your product management question to be answered on our special Q &A episodes. That's all at productvoices.com. And be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform. Now, here's our host, JJ Rorie, CEO of Great Product Management.
Introduction to Product Voices and the topic of building connections
[0:36] Hello and welcome to Product Voices. I'm excited about today's episode.
We're going to be talking about building a product that connects people and, wow, don't we all need connections these days?
So with me today, I've got Yasmin Kothari. She's the product director for Bumble for Friends, Bumble's friendship -finding app.
She focuses on designing the best experiences for people to make platonic connections and build community. She's previously held product leadership roles at Asana, Airbnb, and PayPal, and she started her career in management consulting at McKinsey.
She studied at Harvard Business School and Dartmouth College.
She lives outside New York City with her husband and two -year -old daughter, Yasmin. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with me, for being on the show, and for chatting with me about this really cool product and really fun topic.
Of course. I'm so excited to be here. So, I gave a little bit of a bio there and I love your background.
You've been with some amazing companies and done some really cool things.
[1:34] And because, you know, I just gave a little headline bio, I want you to take us through a little bit more of your background.
Tell us more about what you've done and kind of how you got to where you are now and how everything you've done kind of built you to this point.
Sure, of course. So maybe I'll go chronologically in terms of my career.
So in college, I studied economics and Spanish. And then I went to McKinsey for a consulting job right out of school.
And that was really a great training ground for me because I learned all about strategy.
I learned how to structure problems and break them down into bite -sized pieces.
And I was working with Fortune 500 companies, you know, as a 21 -year -old.
So that was really, really great foundational work for me.
And then after a couple of years there, I decided that I wanted to sort of get my hands in the weeds a little bit more and do some work abroad, a little bit more out of my comfort zone.
So I spent a year working in India and then in Rwanda with some nonprofits that were business -focused nonprofits.
So I worked with Acumen Fund in India and TechnoServe in Rwanda.
[2:43] And that was where I really got much closer to the end user.
So, for example, in Rwanda, I was working with coffee farmers and I was looking at, okay, can we figure out some technology solutions to help coffee farmers make more money or have better crops or generally be more successful?
And as part of that, I was going out into these villages with a translator that I hired and doing all of this research on my own and then coming up with solutions based on their real, you know, jobs to be done.
And that was really, really exciting for me. And it made me realize that I wanted to do work that was a lot more tactical and actually see execution through to the end user.
So after my time abroad, I went to business school where I focused on global business and business and technology.
And I ended up joining PayPal after business school, where I focused on consumer product.
So this was my first real product job. And I was focused on our revamp of our entire consumer experience on web, on mobile, globally.
I got to spend some time in Paris. I got to just really think about, how do you build a launch playbook for a new consumer product?
[3:52] And then I, this was about 2014, I did some work to really think about what I want my career to mean.
And I wrote out a career vision statement for myself. And it sounded something like, I want to use technology to build products that help people find meaningful connection.
And I decided that that would be my North Star for my career, and for all the decisions that I made around my career from then forward.
Yasmin's career vision statement and joining Bumble for Friends
[4:17] So at the time, I got recruited into Airbnb by someone that I had known at PayPal, and I joined Airbnb, and I was really excited about their mission, about connecting guests and hosts from all over the world.
So I got to work on lots of different parts of that business.
I worked on our India scale -up strategy, our China scale -up strategy.
I worked in our payments business.
I worked on our host success product side, and then I also spent some time on the guest product side. And really got to build so many different pieces of that network business.
[4:51] And then after that, I said, okay, what do I want to learn next?
And I decided that I wanted to go really somewhere smaller and scale something up from the ground floor.
And so I joined a startup, and I led the product team and the engineering team there.
And I learned a lot. I learned a lot about fundraising, I learned a lot about growing a large team, I learned a lot about technology in a startup.
Up and took some great lessons from there.
To be honest, that business model didn't quite work out. And so I ended up deciding to leave.
And I decided that the next thing that I wanted to learn was really, how do you scale excellent product teams?
I wanted to learn how you build from that inflection point where your product market fit is there, the product is growing, and you really have to build up quite rigorous product processes and teams.
And so I joined Asana, which has one of the most incredible product teams that I've ever worked with.
And I oversaw a lot of our core product teams.
So a lot of the core pieces of that software were different teams that I was managing.
So that was really interesting because at Asana, I was now helping employees connect in new ways and helping employees work with more accountability and transparency and positivity.
[6:09] So then, really the pinnacle of my career vision always felt like a company like Bumble, a company so focused on building kind connections for people of all walks of life.
And so when I heard about a role at Bumble, it seemed quite up my alley.
So at Bumble now, I am working on Bumble for Friends, which is an app that's really dedicated to finding local friendship and local community.
[6:36] That's amazing. And one of the things I love about your past and your career is how intentional you've been.
And I'm sure that opportunities come along and it's not that they necessarily fall into your lap, but that you can't plan everything and you can't plot out every move, but you have been very intentional.
And a good example of that, or manifestation of that is your vision statement.
I love that you have a career vision statement. I think that's so cool and such a good learning piece for folks out there.
You don't always know exactly what you want, but you can at least have a North Star, like you said.
And yours is connecting people and finding ways to use technology and products to connect people, which I think is really awesome.
So that brings me to my next kind of question for you is, you know, you've talked about that literally being your vision of how you want to, you know, make your career have an impact in making products that connect with people.
Tell me more about that. Like, what does that mean, especially in the kind of context of you ending up at Bumble to build Bumble for Friends.
Tell me, tell me more about making products that connect with people.
The importance of making products that connect with people
[7:47] You know, the truth is that we are in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, and it's a real true health crisis.
Like the impact of this widespread loneliness poses health risks that are as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, which is insane, right?
Like this is such a big health risk that the US Surgeon General has even started a task force that's dedicated to starting to solve this at a national level.
And this trend has been going on for decades, right? But it's been exacerbated by COVID.
There's all this social isolation, people are working remotely, you're not seeing others as often, you're not making connections as easily.
And I really believe that technology is about innovating for a better future, right?
Like, if we're not building a better future, then why would any of us be working in technology?
And so it's incumbent on us as technology builders to solve part of this problem.
So at Bumble, we see technology as a way to connect people online with the goal of going offline.
And that's a really, really important principle for us.
We want to help people make real -world, meaningful, fulfilling relationships.
[8:57] And we're also following a lot of trends right now that are here to stay.
For example, in a recent Bumble for Friends survey that we did in the US, we learned that more than a third of respondents have met new friends online, like whether that's through apps or social media, like that is here to stay, right?
And it's also even more prominent in our younger users.
So two thirds of our Gen Z respondents shared with us that making new friends online lessened their loneliness, which is so powerful.
Loneliness is so debilitating.
And the fact that we can actually build products that change people's lives and address that issue is so motivating to me every single day.
[9:42] That's amazing. And, and, yeah, I mean, right, like, talk about products that matter products that make an impact. That's so cool.
So, you know, again, kind of a product management nerd.
I love the thought that that a company like Bumble, who, you know, is has made their, their, you know, stake in the ground and innovated around romantic relationships and really kind of changed the game there.
The Impact of Loneliness and Bumble's Solution
[10:06] Sees this trend, right, this this market data that's really impacting humans and loneliness epidemic, right?
I mean, it's an amazing thing to hear you say that the health risks are as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That's crazy, right, to even think about.
And so a company like Bumble sees this happening, right, and thinks that they can make a difference, which obviously they can based on what they do in other quote unquote markets, right? romantic relationships.
And they see this opportunity to do it for platonic relationships, which I think is amazing.
And right, something just that is so, something so important for product folks to learn that, you know, once we have the ability and the capabilities to do something, we can, we can turn it and make a difference for even more people, which I think is really cool.
So, so let's dig a little bit into the product itself.
Like tell me a little bit more about what Bumble for Friends is and you know, some of the some of the details that you've you've been able to build into that based on, you know, your research and your, you know, previous capabilities, etc.
[11:17] So Bumble for Friends, at its core, is an app that just connects you with people nearby who have similar interests and similar friendship goals.
Like that's really what we're all about.
So this app was spun off from BFF mode.
So within the Bumble app, since 2016, there have been three modes.
There's the date mode for romantic relationships, there's the friendship mode for, sorry, there's the Bumble for Friends mode for friendships, and then there's the biz mode for business connections.
And so we've had this mode in the app for many years.
[11:53] And what we realize is that actually friendship is so important that it deserves its own app, right?
People are looking for friends at so many different moments of transition.
Maybe they've recently moved, maybe they've recently had a kid, right?
This is really a convenient way to meet people who have similar interests and are in a similar life stage or have a similar mindset to you.
So what that actually looks like is that you can swipe through profiles similar to a dating app.
But in that profile, you'll see all of this relevant information.
What is this person's interest? How might we strike up a friendship?
What do we have in common?
[12:29] And then when two people swipe on each other, then they match.
And then either person can initiate a conversation.
You could also add multiple matches to one conversation to have a group conversation.
And so this is really a convenient way to grow your friendship circle because everyone on this app is actively looking for more friends to add to their community, right?
You can't just walk down the street and ask a random person if they want to be your friend because you don't know what their intentions are.
But on Bumble for Friends, you actually know that every single person here has raised their hand saying, hey, I'm looking for a new friend.
I'm looking for community.
So that is at its core what Bumble for Friends is about.
You know, it's so interesting because, again, I'm older than you, Yasmin.
And so I remember when dating online, online dating and matching that way was new.
And that was, you know, people would say, oh, gosh, no, we could never do that. Right.
But of course, everyone does it. Now, I don't, I don't know, I've been married for a long, long time, so I haven't been on there.
But, but I don't know a single person who hasn't met their partner online. Right.
And so I love the idea that now we can expand it to friends.
And I love the idea that, you know, you had the mode for several years, and you saw it having a need to be its own thing, right?
Which again, I just think it's such a, it's a good product story.
[13:53] You know, the product, the features itself is great. But the idea of, you know, how to bring that, you know, to fruition, I think is awesome.
So I also love the idea or the kind of analogy of walking down the street and saying, hey, you want to be my friend? Like that's never going to happen.
But in this world, right, this app world, in this mobile world, you can do that.
And it makes a lot of sense because you know, you know what they're looking for.
Fostering Inclusion and Welcoming Everyone on Bumble for Friends
[14:19] So I guess I want to know a little bit more about, you know, building these community centric technologies and, you know, focusing on impacting that loneliness, right?
And so how do you go about ensuring that everyone can participate, everyone feels welcome, everyone feels as if it's okay for them to get involved, to swipe, to meet someone new, etc.?
How do you focus on that inclusion side of things and make sure everyone feels welcome?
Yeah, I think that's such an important question.
Something core to our philosophy as we build out this new product is that Bumble for Friends is a place for anyone and everyone to find their people.
[15:07] And so how do we actually do that in the product? Well we need to allow a great degree of flexibility.
Like you need to be able to tailor your own profile in hundreds of different ways.
And so we have hundreds of options for tags, for metadata to add to your profile, anything from rock climbing to being a new mom to looking for a roommate.
Like we have so many different ways that you can tailor your profile to show your authentic self and your intentions or your goals at that moment.
So this really allows each member to express themselves and it allows them to also find other people who are like -minded or who have the same goals or who have the same interests. And this is generally a theme in any community or any marketplace business.
Like how do you allow enough flexibility and enough metadata so that you can actually use that data to better match people or match opportunities for the highest chance of success?
Yeah, absolutely. So as you've had the product out there, and obviously you've had it for years, but then you've had the kind of standalone app now fairly recently, you know, have you have you made any notable changes or updates driven by what you're learning from the consumers using the app? Definitely.
The entire app really came out of consumer feedback.
[16:27] So the whole reason that Bumble launched BFF mode in 2016 was that we noticed a ton of people were using the Bumble app to make connections with people in non -romantic ways, right?
Like, they were looking for a roommate, or they just moved and they were looking to make friends.
And so that's really why the whole idea started back in 2016.
And then we started hearing tons of people who were interested in using some sort of friendship finding product, but felt awkward downloading a dating app, right?
And so they might be in a relationship, they might be married, and they didn't really want to download a dating app.
And so we realized, like, if this really is going to help people in any life stage, then friendship is so important that it deserves its own app.
And so now, we've launched this as a separate app, it's a separate place for you to find friendship, and it's also a separate place for us to start building out new features that are really tailored to friendship finding, right?
So I mentioned earlier our group meetups.
We know that a lot of times people don't wanna only make friends one -to -one, they wanna make friends in groups.
And so we introduced a feature where you can plan across multiple Bumble for Friends connections and bring people together to plan a group meetup.
[17:41] So that is really the genesis of how this started.
And now it gives us a new space, a new real estate to really, really tailor to friendship.
Again, just such a good example of listening to consumers.
Like, I didn't even think about that, actually, the not wanting to download a dating app, even if you were using it for something else. But that totally makes sense, right?
And so just to see that little insight and then, again, kind of spin it off, if you will, I think that's really awesome.
So, when you're building the product or enhancing the product, making it its own app and kind of its own experience, you obviously have tailored it to friendship as opposed to romantic relationships, which is kind of the original bumble, if you will.
Can you give some examples like how building an app for friendship is different or maybe the same in some cases from building one from the dating perspective?
Yeah, and I love that you asked about similarities and differences because I think there are both, right?
So Bumble for Friends right now models a very similar experience to Bumble Date, where you see profiles for potential friends, you see what common interests you have, you swipe right or you swipe left, and then you can make matches.
[18:55] And so there are similarities there because at the end of the day, you're looking for someone who you're compatible with in one way or another.
But there are also a bunch of considerations that we think about now when it comes to romantic versus platonic relationships and what you actually need there.
So let me give you a really tactical and small but insightful example.
[19:15] In the date product you have 24 hours to respond to a message.
So someone messages you and then you have one day to respond to them and that really encourages people to not ghost each other and make sure that they're being intentional.
Now, we heard from our members when we launched our new app and we saw in our data that friendship isn't necessarily as daily of a use case the same way that dating is, right? It's not as acute a pain point.
You might not be checking that app every single day.
Tailoring the product for friendship and community building
[19:44] And so we realized that actually we might need to test a different type of timer.
So now we're testing a 72 -hour timer, which much more closely aligns to the intentions of our community. and we're already seeing really promising results from that.
In general, there are so many ways that we are going to be tailoring this product more and more for friendship, right, because it is different from dating.
Unlike dating, we believe that everyone has this continual need for new friendships, for new community over the course of their life as you're transitioning to new life stages, as you're having new experiences, as you're picking up new hobbies, and so we're really thinking deeply about how we support people in each of those moments of transition through our product.
You know, it's really interesting. I love this product and what it's doing for folks because I do a lot of research on corporate.
Environments and, you know, work from home, remote, whatever.
And, and, you know, how that, how that's working, and companies wanting to move back to work from the office or stay remote, whatever it is.
And I had some assumptions going in to some of my loose research, I'll say, it's not, not, not heavy research, that young people, Gen Z, etc, would want, new grads, etc, would want to be remote, or at least hybrid.
[21:05] You know, for obvious reasons, right? They're the tech heaviest and, you know, all of that, they can live anywhere, et cetera.
But actually in my research, I'm finding that one of the reasons why they want to go into the office is number one, for their career perspectives and learning and that, and number two, loneliness, right?
And isolation, and they feel as if a lot of them are moving to new cities and that's how they meet people.
And if I look back on my career, and I'm sure if you look back on your career, That's how you started some of your friend circles was the people you work with.
And, and so we're not necessarily getting that right now in all, um, companies and in all, um, instances.
And so something like this can really help someone who's moving to a new city for a new job, but not actually getting that same environment of, you know, coworkers every day.
Um, so it's just really, again, just a really great extension, I think, of something you've already built, but really looking at consumer data to pivot it a bit and and solve another type of problem, which I think is really, really cool.
Yes, exactly. So, I want to...
Pivot a little bit, just, you know, because I want to pick your brain a little bit on general product management and product leadership.
Philosophy of product leadership: Product, Process, and People
[22:18] So do you, you know, have you built a philosophy or a mental model, if you will, on how you think about product leadership over your career?
[22:28] Yeah, I tend to think of my job as a mix of three P's, product, process, and people.
[22:35] So I think people tend to focus on the product part of the job, right? Because that's really table stakes.
This is all about learning as much as you can about the end user, really leveraging qualitative and quantitative data, building up your product intuition, and then designing the right tests and features to make progress forward for your end user.
So that's sort of the most foundational piece of my job.
[23:01] And then there's the people aspect. It's so, so important to me to build the right relationships and collaborate effectively with the people that I work with.
So that could be anything from collaborating with other PMs who might have my own areas that touch your own.
It might mean building really strong bridges with engineering and design because those are really your closest counterparts.
For me now as a manager, this really involves coaching and supporting my PMs to help them scale their impact, right?
Because now I'm not necessarily scaling through my product work, but I'm more scaling through the people that I am supporting.
[23:37] And so that means I'm helping each PM on my team build up trust so that they can really operate with a high degree of autonomy, which is so important to most PMs.
It also means giving them the right context, right? Like I might be in some conversations that they weren't in, and so making sure that they know exactly how their work fits into the bigger picture.
And then it's also about really getting to know them, getting to know their goals, getting to know the gaps to get them to their goals, and then helping find the right projects and opportunities for them to grow. So that's the people side.
The importance of designing the right process for efficiency
[24:11] And then lastly is process. I think process often gets overlooked, like it's almost like a bad word to say process, but that's really dangerous because if you don't design the right process you'll end up with something ad hoc, something messy, something that doesn't meet your needs.
And right now like a lot of times people think of process as unnecessary administrative work that really really slows them down, but actually it's just the opposite.
Like process needs to be the path to speed. If you bring in the right people at the right time and have the right conversations early on, that's how you actually move faster, right?
Because there's just enough process to avoid confusion, to avoid mistakes, but not so much process that it results in all this unnecessary paperwork.
And so finding that balance is often the role of the product leader.
[25:02] Totally makes sense. And I love the simplicity of it while, you know, really touching on all of those important pillars in a product leader's role.
And, and the, the product, the process and the people, they're all connected, obviously, right?
The better you get at process and, and love your points about, you know, no process is not necessarily the good thing, even though a lot of people would, would hang their hat on that.
You know, having the right level of process to make people's jobs easier and have clarity around those is going to lead to so much trust in your people and that sort of thing.
And so I love it. I love looking at looking at that.
And I bet, at least from my perspective, I bet you would agree with this is that it's as a leader, it's important to really.
[25:47] You know, excel in all three of those, even as you're sometimes pulling on, you know, some levers more heavily in process at some points and more heavily in people in some points and sometimes the product, but you got to pivot and really be kind of have a high acumen in all three of those.
Definitely. So I love that product process and people. Okay, so general advice for anyone who's looking to get into PM. There's a lot of folks now who are interested in a product career.
Get close to the user and become an expert on their needs
[26:16] Yeah, you were just talking about how sometimes you need to focus on the product aspect or the people aspect or the process aspect at different points in your career and at different points in the projects that you're working on.
And I think for people who are looking to get into PM and looking for their first sort of foot in the door, it's really about the product part of those three.
So my advice is pretty simple. My advice is get close to the user.
Get a job that gets you close to the end user.
Like if you're finding it difficult to get a job with the actual title product manager in the title, then you need to find a way to get as close to users and become an expert on their needs, right?
So that could mean anything from customer service, where you're talking to people all the time, to sales rep, where you're really learning about people's pain points, to data analyst or user research, where you're really, really understanding what users are telling us, whether through their words or through their actions.
[27:14] And then once you're in that role, learn as much about customer problems as possibly can.
Like partner with the product teams on building solutions to those problems.
Offer your time up for free to help the product management team, help them define the problems, help them define and build the solutions, right?
And like really, really figuring out how you can use your expertise in the user to get closer to the product management team. And then you'll have a case to make a lateral move, whether that's in the company or getting the product title at another company.
So I really think that is the best way to move into product.
[27:50] Yeah, that's such good advice. Like having that problem analysis, that customer experience is so important.
And the story is just so much easier to tell on why you would be good in product and how that would translate.
So really, really good advice. So anyone listening who's not in product yet, that is a really, really good piece of advice.
Balancing parenthood and work, advice for new parents
[28:11] So my final question for you is, and I hope you don't mind me asking this, I think it's something that really is gonna resonate with a lot of folks out there.
So I mentioned earlier that you've got a two -year -old daughter, which is amazing and wonderful, and I'm sure you're incredibly busy with her and work.
So how do you, balance parenthood and work? How have you found that balancing act?
And, you know, what advice would you give to others who are maybe new parents and trying to balance a career that means a lot to them with a family and children?
Yeah, you know, that might be the most difficult question that you've asked me.
[28:56] It's really hard. I think it's really hard to balance parenthood and work, and it's also very fulfilling.
I think it really comes down to three things that help me keep my sanity.
So the first is my support network. I think it's so vital to have a support network when you have kids, and whether that is, you that lives nearby, or a partner that you're raising the child with, or, you know, really great daycare and childcare providers.
You just need to build up the right support system and design that support system into your life.
So that's the first thing. The second thing I would say is life hacks.
Like, I'm all about life hacks. I'm all about things that can make my life more efficient.
So, you know, things like batch cooking food for my daughter on the weekend, or, you know, giving up the fight when she wants to wear the same outfit three days in a row.
Like, what are the life hacks that I can do that just make things easier and more seamless in my day to day?
And then the last thing is really just grace and empathy for myself, like knowing that most moments are not going to be Instagram perfect, right? Most moments are going to be messy.
I'm never going to be able to do all of the things that I want to do and knowing that that's okay and just giving myself a little bit of empathy in those moments.
Building Meaningful Connections: Bumble for Friends
[30:16] Yeah, I love that. Thank you for sharing that advice. I think it's, you know, so helpful for folks out there who really want to balance that and who, like you said, find tremendous fulfillment in being a parent, but they also have lots of career aspirations as well. So, love that. I have cats, not kids, so I have it a little bit easier, but I'm sure a two -year -old daughter is a lot of fun, but I bet you don't get a lot of sleep. So, thank you so much, Yasmin. This has been a fun conversation. I have loved hearing more about how you've built Bumble for Friends and how that's turned into something really cool. And so everyone out there, go download Bumble for Friends. I know I will. And maybe we'll all be BFFs. We'll find each other on there. So Yasmin, thank you so much for joining me and sharing all of your insights. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. I had so much fun. And yes, everyone, go download Bumble for Friends and make a new friend. Absolutely. Thank you all for joining us on Product Voices. Hope to see you on the next episode. Thank you for listening to Product Voices, hosted by J .J. Rory. To find more information on our guests, resources discussed during the episode, or to submit a question for our Q &A episodes, visit the show's website, productvoices .com, and be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform. [31:39] Music.