Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…as a totally different job from what we do now. Marketing was a lot more agile in the lowercase sense of agile and it mapped to my mind better as someone who's really influenced by the book, The Goal. I think the tangible pieces of advice to get to this level that may be helpful is I always focused on where I thought there was leverage. I wanted to learn everything I could and focus on the things that had a big impact regardless of the org structure or the career path that meant, I wanted to really have a deep understanding of the entire business so I knew just what was worth focusing on to help the business. I think one of the things that's different about being a chief product officer versus other product roles is how much of a company leadership role it is versus a functional leadership role. You're expected in this role to optimize for the entire company, even at the expense of what's good for your team, so you really have to learn how to optimize for company first. That's like a key thing to learn that I think new executives can struggle with. And what advantage I think I had is I've basically been working with executives since my first job at apartments.com, so I learned to speak their language and understood what they cared about pretty early in my career. And this is a really important element, assume that questions from them are them trying to learn versus them assuming you don't know something and testing you about it. I find that a lot of people get intimidated by executive questions when the executive is just trying to understand things. And then that changes the interaction you can have. The other element that served me well was just refusing to specialize. I thought if I could learn all the skills that would allow me to combine them to work on the most important things versus only work on the thing I knew how to work on. And that definitely led to slower visible progress in terms of career growth or titles, but it was a much faster path to the true executive role because I could speak better with CEOs about more topics than most of my peers. Obviously this is all my individual experience there are many paths to get to this type of level, but those are some things that have worked for me. That was such an incredible definition and so much good advice there. And this is a good segue to another area that you have a really interesting insight on around the spectrum of product people. When I think of you, I think of two by twos and this is I think just a spectrum, which is unusual for Casey framework. Yeah.…

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