Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I often don't think about what I want them to do. I just think that's sort of a selfish way to think about it. They have something they want to do. I'm trying to help them. I just don't ever approach these things of the user's something for me to exploit and take advantage of and manipulate. I know there's people that do approach it that way, which I think is a little unfortunate. But as a designer, I guess I have my own set of values and my own kind of compass on these things that's pushed me in a certain way of thinking about it. And so I'm kind of constantly asking what's the right thing for the user? And I believe in my heart that if we prioritize that wonderful things will happen for all the metrics, including the money metrics that matter. I've never seen a product be successful that used metrics as a driver for what they were doing. I've seen a lot of companies be really successfully seeing metrics as a consequence and a way to evaluate the quality of their decisions, and then using those to triangulate and make better decisions moving forward. So they're kind of a very useful feedback mechanism. But I think there's definitely a risk to confusing, doing something because it's a driver versus something as a consequence. There's a few more questions I would ask, but I want to come back to something that I asked earlier, that I think is on the minds of a lot of say founders and product managers listening to this. I'm just like, okay, this all is sounds really great. I would love to make these experiences so great. It's going to take us a lot of time to do this really, really well. You said that it doesn't have to. What's a tactical tip or two that you can suggest to a founder or product manager to help them contain the design process while also achieving these outcomes that you're describing? Well, I think if you can give... Maybe one way to think about it is like a big giant AI prompt. The more context you can give it, the more specificity you can give it, the more this is what I'm about and what we're trying to get to, the more the designer's going to be able to figure out which swim lane they're supposed to be in to produce something. So I think if you're going into it feeling like the design process is going to take a lot of time, it's because you haven't been clear in your creative brief, so to speak, which often means you're not really clear in your own head. And I think... I have worked with a lot of founders, and we could identify a bunch of big companies, who I think got started that weren't clear in their own head. I don't want to... Yahoo was an amazing company, but if we just look at Yahoo for a second, I worked there, it was never clear to me what the founding vision of Yahoo was. And I talk a lot about vision statements and we could say the vision statement of Google is organizing all the world's information. That's a great vision. They'll never achieve that. That's something that's always over the horizon. And it's been a very useful organizing principle for their acquisitions and how the company grows. Amazon to be the Earth's most customer-centric company. Okay, great. That's a vision, they will never get there. It tells you how they're going to expand. Apple doesn't have an explicit vision, but I might describe it as personal computing can have a transformative effect on the lives of individuals. And I think that kind of focuses a lot of what they're trying to do. Disneyland, still the best vision statement of all time, which is the happiest place on earth. So once you tell an employee this is supposed to be the happiest place on earth, then you're signaling all sorts of things about how they need to pick up the trash and how they need to show up on time and how they need to wear their uniform. You're just signaling a whole bunch of stuff. So when I talked to founders, a lot of times they just don't have that clarity of what's the vision of the company. And to go back to Yahoo for a second, I never heard of vision. And so I'm not really sure what they were ever about. They kind of stumbled into the directory and then they added a bunch of stuff around the edges, but it never seemed to make a lot of sense. And so I think people operating inside Yahoo, it ended up being inefficient, because they were having to deal with all that ambiguity. So I think that that can also be a pretty big risk for founders. They end up caught up with a product idea, and they think that the company is the product, the company is not the product. The product is the product and the company's bigger than the product. And you need to have some vision that speaks beyond just this particular thing.…

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