After I’d logged eighteen months as a product manager, Jim Lally—by then the head of systems marketing, and a great mentor and hero of mine—said to me, “Doerr, if you want to be a really good general manager someday, you need to get out in the field, sell, get rejected, and learn to meet a quota. You can have all the technical expertise in the world, but you’ll succeed or fail in this business based on whether your team makes their numbers.”
