Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I love that. In the spectrum of advice, every post of mine will say mostly, maybe, it depends, so we all have some opportunity to flex into the other direction. Shifting a little bit, coming back to just the bigger picture of John Cutler, you've had more exposure I think to product teams and product managers, you're definitely in the top 1% of people that have talked to and met with and seen what happens within product teams. There's a lot of stuff I want to dig into there and the first is around what you've found differentiates the highest performing teams. Let me just ask you this very succinct question and see where it goes. If you had to just boil it down, what have you seen most differentiates the highest performing product teams? First of all, they're top 1%, they're super, super productive, they can levitate, they can do ... they have no emotion. No, I'm just kidding. No. Okay, this is my tack for answering the question. First of all, I have this friend Josh Arnold and he had this great principle that held true in my experience talking with teams and he calls it the reverse Anna Karenina principle. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy is basically the like, "The dysfunctional families are all different and the happy families are the same," and what he said is it's the reverse of that with product teams, that actually the dysfunctional companies are all the same and then the happy companies or the higher performing companies can be very, very different. That's something that stuck with me because either you have easy to identify anti patterns, and I'm going to admit earlier in my career, maybe five or six years ago, my content was about identifying things that people would be like, "How did you know that was working in my company?" and I would just be like, "Well, I just know." Even Spencer and I had this thing. I put something on Twitter and Spencer writes me, he's like, "John, is this about amplitude?" and I'm like, "No man. It's like that Carly Simon song, Spencer. You probably think this song is about you, but it's not." It just is. It's just like those things. Either you have the very easy to identify anti patterns or you have the high level principles, like you must trust each other or you must do something like that. But the way that companies achieve those particular high performing things can be vastly, vastly, vastly different. Let's just start with that as a basic thing, which is one reason why it makes me hard to answer the question. A great example here is great product leadership. We need great product leaders. But you meet [inaudible 00:30:11] product leaders and you see that some people are these humble, curious servant product leaders. They're not really talking a lot and they're just growing the system that way. You know what? There's other companies with really successful people that are just badass, strong, dominant, they like to spar. I need people who can spar with me. That's just one potential example there of okay, you meet enough teams and you see that there's many ways to achieve great leadership [inaudible 00:30:41] example. Another example would be, and then I'm going to start listing these things off and then hopefully this makes more sense.…

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