Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I mean, I think there are people who find joy in solving hard problems, and the joy you get from working on the hard problem is fulfilling and you don't need to seek external validation for the things you do every single day. So yeah, I loved hiring people like that. Let me zoom out a little bit. So we've been talking a lot about the skills that you built and the mindset that you built to be successful individually, but also you managed large teams, you helped scale Airbnb massively through hyper growth, and there's a few skills I noticed you're really good at that were specifically applied to scaling an org, building an org, building teams and things like that, and so I want to spend a little time there. You touched on this one a little bit, but I think there's more here, around setting priorities. You're incredibly good at setting priorities and making sure everyone's aligned, making sure the main thing is the main thing. Can you just talk about what else you've seen be important here, as a leader of a larger, growing org, around setting priorities? I have a lot of strong opinions here with setting priorities. I would say the first one is, and this was my motto for the longest time and it still is, you've got to let fires burn. And what that means is you can do it all. You just need to let go of things that are not important because if you have 20 different things that you're equally engaged on, it just means you don't actually know what is most important. And so my motto has always been let fires burn. You've got to be okay with some things not going well so that you can dedicate most of your energy on the few things that actually matter and the things that are most important. And it's hard to do, it doesn't feel good. Again, many people, especially PMs, are perfectionists, and so it hurts when things aren't going well, and you've just got to learn how to let things go. What I always did was I kicked off every Monday with a leadership meeting where we would talk about our priorities for the week. We would not talk about longer-term priorities. It was literally like for this week, what are we trying to get done, and it could only be one to three things, and we would jointly agree on the fires that we would let burn. And so then when my partner, my engineering counterpart or my design counterpart, would see a fire burning, they would know, yep, we agreed that we're going to keep letting the fire burn for now. And it was just really important to be aligned as a team on that. Now, the other thing that I've learned is you've got to let other people burn fires too, and it's very actually empowering. And oftentimes, I remember, especially when you're leading a very large organization, there could be teams and many different leaders who you're working with, oftentimes, people come to you and are basically like, "We've got to do this new thing to drive goal one, and I just don't have enough resources. And we need to hire more people, and we need to expand the resources of this team." My first question always was, "Well, what are your actual priorities and what can we let burn?" Meaning do you actually have to expand and do more things or can we maybe reprioritize certain things and focus on fewer things and put a lot more energy behind them? But to have those conversations as a leader, you'll also have to recognize that people on your team are eventually in a really good position to gauge what fires should be burning and which are not to be burning. Now the one thing I'll say though, is it could be dangerous, and there are some things that you should never let burn, because if you let them burn for too long, bad stuff's going to happen. So I have a few of those examples for me that I have, over the years, learned to not let burn. First, timelines, major timelines. This is like huge product launches. Once timelines slip, you basically establish precedent that timelines are not as important and timelines can always slip. So you never want to set the precedent let timelines slip.…

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