Lenny Rachitsky: commitment

Transcript context

…Yes. I love these. This whole idea of appetites, it's very appealing. It makes so much sense. It's like the ultimate impact to effort calculation. The effort we'll put into this is fixed and we'll not go beyond this because the impact we expect from this is pretty clear. And if the effort goes up and up and up, well why did we even do this? But obviously the downside is you can't promise things really to sales marketing, which I think makes sense in your type of business. Do you see this work in businesses that aren't your business this approach? Well, let me talk about promises for a second. Promises are the downfall of every business. Every time we've made a promise to get something out in a certain period of time and we kind of inevitably seem to miss it, it's funny how it's almost like it would've been out in time, but the fact that we'd promised it made it not deliver in time. There's some strange thing that happens when you promise things. So we've learned to not promise anything. We can share what we're working on if we want to. We can tell people we're doing something. And by the way, the worst promise, and by the way, we've made a couple of these recently, we always regret them. It's like by the end of the year. That's the one promise you got to be very careful of, because it's so easy to make. There's nothing easier than promising work later. And the further away it is, the easier it is to promise. And so this whole, by the end of the year, oh, red flag. Just remind yourself whenever you say that to yourself, go, oh, wait a second. Wait, wait, what am I doing right now? Because you're probably setting yourself up for disappointment. So as far as other companies running this way, there are a number of other companies that are running this way and more and more are adopting Shape Up all the time. But it's a struggle. It's hard. It's hard to change the way you work. I think companies form roots and roots go in the ground and once your root structure is formed, the plant that grows from that is the plant that grows from that, basically. You kind of have to uproot. And this is not really a totally clear metaphor because that plant is that plant, but you almost have to plant a new seed somewhere else, let's just say, and then grow something new because it's very hard to change in flight and change what you have and change what you're used to. So what we often encourage people to do is keep working the way you're working, but some future project, some low criticality project, try this new method on that. So if it doesn't work, because it's probably not going to work very well the first time, just like if I gave you a guitar and you never played before, it'd be unreasonable for me to expect you to play well. You're going to suck for a while. So go pick some things that don't matter if you suck at them for a while and try this method over there and go, oh, you know what? I'm actually getting quite good. Now let's try to bring this into some more critical stuff. I think that's the important way to approach these sorts of projects, which is to take the criticality out. Because what ends up happening is that when people try to try something new on something really critical and it doesn't work, they'll never try it again. They've destroyed all future opportunities to try this again, because everyone knows how bad it went last time on something that really mattered. And they would've gone, we could have done it our old way. Our old way worked. It kind of sucked, but it worked.…

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