Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's the most common resume advice I see, is show the number, show the impact, say what you did. I have a friend who does resume coaching, and I showed her my resume a couple of years ago. And she said, "I love your resume except for one thing. Why do you write like a little girl? Say what you did, say what your contributions were. Don't say 'I helped. I may have maybe helped people do this'. Say the impact. Put the number on it." And I think I needed to hear that from her because I think there is a tendency, especially for those of us who do really thrive in that collaborative environment, who our nature is to not want to take credit for work that could only exist via the contributions of many people with diverse experiences and perspectives. It's really hard to say, "Well, I did this and I contributed to that," but that's part of why I wrote this book at the team level, because I think for folks, like myself, who really enjoy and thrive in that team environment, if you can look at the product team as the foundational unit of impact and say, "We delivered this. We were able to work together to have this impact for the business," that feels really good and also speaks directly to the work that that team did together. That's a really interesting insight. I think a lot of this comes from just PMs naturally are trained to deflect credit and to include, say 'we' in everything and just this person did that. So I get where that comes from. So most listeners will probably still be thinking, "Yes, I'm driving impact, I'm great. I don't have a problem here. I don't to change, need to change anything." What are some ways to stress test your thinking? Maybe some questions to ask yourself or maybe your team of just, like, "Okay, maybe I'm not?" So the first question I ask most of the teams I work with is if you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund your own team? And that is a small question that can provoke some big reactions. Because, for me, when I was working as a product manager, I truly believed that my job was to find the next most defensible thing to build, build it, celebrate it, find the next most defensible thing to build, and so on and so forth. Rinse and repeat forever and ever. I kind of assumed that the existence of my team was this righteous fact of the universe, right? My team would always be there for all time, and it was just a matter of us finding the next thing to work on, which meant doing discovery and making concessions to what leadership wanted and doing all that stakeholder management. But the idea that my team came at a cost to the business, that at some point somebody might look at my team on a spreadsheet and say, "Who are these very expensive people? Why do we need them? Do we actually need them?" It just wasn't something that crossed my mind because I wasn't in the room for those conversations. That wasn't how I was thinking about my team's work. So I like asking this question because it's a perspective shift. It gets you thinking if you were personally accountable for the existential market-level success of this business, would you invest in your team? And frankly, most of the people I ask that question to don't know the answer right away. They're not sure. They say, "I think so," or, "Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because... " And then you can see the gears turning. And again, to me that is a risky situation to be in because if you can't answer that question as a member of the team, nobody else in the organization is going to be as well-equipped to answer that question as you are. So bringing that question to the team, asking it and answering it proactively and collaboratively and being ready to say, "Okay, if we can't answer this confidently, what are the changes we need to make? Do we need to change our purview? Do we need to change our goals? Who do we need to talk to? What do we need to do in order to make this happen, in order to answer that question confidently?" We are much better off having that conversation at the team level than waiting for someone else to have it for us, or at us.…

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