Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…s they're never commercialized. They're often produced for inspiration, and to potentially take some part of them, like maybe a technology or a feature, and that is brought into mainstream production. So think of these prototypes as these concept cars that really drive inspiration and potentially give you some small nuggets that you can run with. And then you start doing research with them with potential users, you answer key questions, and you uncover certain elements that resonate with people. So you eliminate a whole bunch of stuff, you combine a whole bunch of stuff, and you establish some winning components that are interesting. And then what you do is you push stuff that is winning into the product, live product, testing. So this is actually something that you actually want to start testing your way into and understanding if it works from a scalable standpoint. And this whole thing is typically led not by the PM team, but by design and UXR. And intentionally it's a little bit more open-ended and green field. And it actually is a very different mind space that people have when they approach big. So the roadmap is really built through a combination of small-S and big-S work. And, for example, at VRChat, we are doing both small-S and big-S work, Lenny. And they are run as parallel work streams. The product management team is leading the charge of the small-S work, and the design team is leading the charge on the big-S work. And it's really exciting stuff. What's coming out of both work streams is really exciting and really different. And so we are building the bridge from both sides and both work streams ultimately flow into one roadmap. It's almost like two tributaries that ultimately merge into one river. That's how I would think about it. There's so many things here that are so interesting. One is we've had this conversation on the podcast a couple of times, this point that people think and see the world differently. Some people are very open-minded and creative, and think big, blue sky people. Some people, me, just like, "What are we doing next? How do we move this metric? Let's talk about concrete things that we can do? " For this big S approach, I think what I'm hearing is make sure the people leading it are very open-minded, creative, blue sky type people. If you're the person that's like, "How will this move our metric?" Maybe you shouldn't be leading it and give someone else the reins. Cool. And then with these timelines of doing both at once, it's probably hard to align them fully. So what I'm hearing is it's like these are kind of ongoing sometimes. Correct.…

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