Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…And actually, Lenny, I think it's worth highlighting because that is an anti-pattern I see a lot, especially after the founders leave. You know how a lot of times in product, we'll talk about there's value creation activities, there's value capture activities. Discovery is all about value creation, optimization's all about value capture. And they're both great, absolutely. You should do both, but so many companies after the founders leave, they're scared. They're literally scared. The product teams are scared, the executives are scared. And the reason they're scared is because they don't know what is essential and what is incidental. They're scared they're going to hurt the thing that's fueling the business. Now of course, the founders knew the thing because they were there from the beginning. They have all this institutional knowledge. They know what's important, they know what's not, and they have that confidence. Sometimes we talk about the moral authority of the founder. They know and they know deeply what is essential and what's not. But when they're gone, very often we see companies that are scared. I can tell because all they're doing is little low risk, Optimizely A/B tests. They're just doing these little A/B tests. They're just tweaking the workflows, the main flows, growth, retention. They're just tweaking. And again, there's nothing wrong with that, but those things will not innovate. They will not cause major improvements to the company. So once they stop doing real discovery, to me, it's just the beginning of the end. What's interesting there is if folks at the top are running it have ideas are not confident about where to go, you think they would empower their teams on the ground to figure out what to do. Instead, they turn into these top down feature teams and they tell them, "Let's just build this thing. I don't know, but it's probably the best idea and I probably know more than you do," and they don't. And in fact, that was one of the diseases that Steve Jobs highlighted in that interview. He called it the disease of the stakeholders, of the managers, where they think that an idea is 90% of the work. And that's how he called it out. And he's like, "They don't understand. The idea is minor. The idea is just to start." I think he said, "The whole craftsmanship of going from an idea to a product." This is what we call product discovery. He was describing product discovery and how things change constantly with every iteration. You make trade offs, it starts off one way, it ends up another way. And of course, he's pointing out that most of these executives have no idea, no appreciation for that's actually how you get a great product. It's not that a bunch of executives go in a room and they come up with their prioritized list of features and then they just tell the teams to build them. In fact, we know at this point only about 20% of those things will generate any positive return. So you think there's enough evidence out there that they would realize that was fatal, but I think it's a lot of arrogance because every executive thinks they're smarter than every other one, and so theirs are the better ideas. But it's really not that way. I mean, good product teams and good product companies know that an idea's just the very sparkle in the eye, it's just the start. Getting to a product is what matters, and that's work.…

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