Sanchan Saxena
VP Product at Coinbase. Previously VP Product at Airbnb (through the COVID crisis, 2020) and Instagram (pre-revenue era, under Kevin Systrom). Earlier career at Microsoft, where he worked on Hotmail.
Saxena has lived through three distinct company transformation moments: Instagram finding its identity before monetisation, Airbnb surviving an existential crisis, and Coinbase navigating the complexity of a regulated consumer-plus-institutional platform. His thinking is shaped less by frameworks and more by the question of what to do when plans fail.
Key positions
- The measure of a great product leader is not planning thoroughness but composure and decisiveness when things go wrong.
- The biggest product calls are not made by A/B testing — they are made by conviction. Kevin Systrom did not A/B test Instagram Stories; he committed.
- Hire people who know the domain (content) and teach them process; the reverse does not work.
- DRI with disagree and champion — not just commit. Passive compliance is insufficient once a decision is made.
- Brian Chesky’s 15/10 method: design the unconstrained ideal end state first, then work backwards. Prevents anchoring on technical convenience.