Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. And then the last one, growth teams are often too obsessed about removing friction. Because if we remove the steps, then more people are going to get to the destination. And to an extent, if you cause horrible friction in your product where it's just confusing about what the next step is, I agree, go fix the friction of the cognitive load that it takes to complete a step. That is the friction that you should be working on. However, just removing steps or yanking or simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable of doing is a completely failed growth tactic. So simplifying may be an initiative of a different problem that you're solving, but if you ever have a line item on your roadmap that says simplified onboarding, please cross it out. It's not going to work because simplifying onboarding is an action. What is the problem that you're solving? You're never trying to solve a problem of simplifying. You always have a problem of people are confused in it, but people don't know where to go or they get lost in it or they're not educated enough. That is the problem. And simplifying might be a solution, but it can never be a problem on its own. And too many growth teams are just obsessed with this notion that came out I think in early 2000s, like, oh, simplifying is the biggest growth hack that you can do. Do it. It's only a solution to a very specific problem set of too much complexity. Wow, that was a big one to end on. That I think will help a lot of people avoid wasting time. Again, a whole other podcast conversation probably focus just on onboarding advice that you probably have, that I know you have. We've reached the last item. Is there anything else you want to share about this list before we move on? No, I think we've spent too much time. We're ready to go.…

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