Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. And so that's quite a lot of impact. And being a finance team, they said logically we should just double the team. If each person brings in more than a million, if we want to double the AR, let's just double the team. And so I actually pushed back significantly though. I thought to myself, "If we double the team, what is everyone on the team going to own and drive? Is it like we split up different parts of the website, different parts of the product 1:00 PM owns just like the checkout flow. I didn't think that was going to be interesting enough for the team and going to help us recruit people that were excited to solve such small parts of the growth problem. And so really thinking about how do you carve out scope and if you are a growth team, maybe thinking about splitting up by problems to solve that are really meaty by areas of the funnel like activation, monetization, et cetera. So first starting out with carving out good scope. And then the second thing is just infusing a culture of thinking like an owner. This infusing of the culture, I think it comes out in a few ways. One is, and this is really common in growth. Growth is so cross-functional that you often will end up feeling like you're blocked by other teams. Let's say we want to run an experiment on this part of the product, maybe it's a core PM that kind of owns that service area that doesn't want to drive that thing or let's say or blocked by a bottleneck on designer engineering. It's something where I think if you're thinking an owner, you are not feeling easily disempowered because you can't do something and instead you're thinking, "What is everything I can do and did I exhaust all the options?" And then finally it's leading by example. I try to also show to my team that I'm always thinking like an owner and then I'm always trying to do everything I can. And finally as a leader, thinking like an owner also means taking responsibility for your team. And so if things don't go right in my team, I'm the first one to say that ultimately I'm responsible and it's a failure or oversight on my side. And so that is what I think an ownership mentality is. It's just really thinking about the scope, creating that culture and then as a leader it's just seeing yourself as ultimately being accountable. Awesome. And this connects to something else I wanted to pull the thread on, which is the team first bucket. I think about Meta, not to throw them under the bus or anything, but I feel like everyone I know at Meta their performance review is very tied to their impact. It's very impact driven and that leads to people needing to drive impact themselves. I drove this impact and they look at how much did you contribute to that impact versus other people on your team. And it creates some challenges I think for people. How do you create that feeling of team first, even though your performance as you talked about is so tied to here's your success metric, here's what success means for you, for the team, how do you make it feel team first versus like, I need to do this myself? There's definitely a delicate balance here. It comes down to the way that I think the manager leads the team and sets the tone. And so for me, I always make it clear that even though results are important, it's a team sport. And so I often find that I am encouraging the team to work together. So again, as a leader, you have context in everything happening. So sometimes I know 1:00 PM is working on something or even a PM outside our team is working on something and I try to actually fill in context if I think someone on my team could contribute. And I encourage that action even though it doesn't maybe feed into impact on the thing they're driving. So it really comes down to the culture that you set and what you encourage the team to do. I also think the more that you can see that you actually benefit from helping each other out, the better it is. And finally, I think again, leading by example, because I actually am very team first, I'm often actually helping other teams and doing things that might not ultimately benefit or be part of my scope. A good example here is I was actually driving pricing and packaging at Webflow for a very long time just because no one at the company was driving it and it was a huge opportunity area and I actually was doing it for enterprise pricing too. And so even though I am overseeing self-serve, I was actually supporting enterprise pricing and packaging. And so I also showed to my team, "Hey, I'm also doing all these things to help the company." And I think that is what helps set that tone and that culture.…

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