Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…If there's an ecosystem approach, if there's something that if it works, it'll be self-accelerating. So okay, what you're going to do this thing, we aren't entirely sure what's going to work, but if a developer writes a thing and somebody uses it, it'll attract more developers, more users, and then this would grow on its own. Then and it's cheap to do the little example of the thing. It's cheap to build a little open source, tinker the little thing and just put it there. And if nobody uses it, it's fine. It was fun to build. It took you three hours. It's fine. If someone does use it, then you just invest in incremental bit of unit each time that you find a signal that somebody is finding it useful and then you stop if you ever cease getting that information. So I would use this. Anything that is shaped like an ecosystem that has some kind of network effect, and many things have network effects, have some kind of compounding loop. Compounding loops are not rare. They are, "Look." It's like truffle hunting. You have to know what you're looking for and find the dynamics of a thing that if it worked would work at an accelerating rate. Lots and lots and lots of things intrinsically have this shape. Anything with a network effect, anything where the power goes up with a number of users, but it shows up in all kinds of problems that we don't normally apply it to. Along the same lines, you also advise people to think more emergence-oriented versus top-down, kind of what you were just saying. But I think that's another really interesting way of thinking about the same idea, create opportunities for emergence, bottom-up versus top-down control. You just chat about that. 100%. I think the emergence is one of the most powerful forces if you know how to marshal it and you know how to work with it. And the only thing that's hard about it in my opinion is you're going to look like you aren't very serious. You're going to look like a weirdo. You're going to look like a cook. And one of the downsides, if you're working on something and you're doing the normal top-down approach where you make the plan, you execute the plan, even if the plan turns out to not be useful, you produce a thing and nothing interesting happens, no one can say you didn't work hard. But if you try doing this designing for emergence and something amazing happens, even once it happens, people go, "Ah, it's luck. Where was the miraculous moment, the heroic moment where you made that happen? So therefore you had nothing to do with it." And this was the biggest unlock in my career actually was when I stopped my guts. I was promoted to director at Google. I was like, "Cool, I never want to be promoted inside of a large organization ever again." And the freedom to now do the highest impact work, even if I can't make it legible to the organization, was so powerful and I was able to 10X my impact for the organization because I didn't have to worry about making it measurable specifically in a way that would show individual work effort. And I think that's the hardest part. And you have to have, typically what I would advise for PMs, my approach at Google was 70% of my effort and my team's effort should go on things that everybody acknowledges are important and useful and create value. Maybe it's boring, linear value, but some kind of value. You're trying to minimize the chance that any other person in a company will say, "What does that team do anyway?" This, if someone says this about your team, your team is on the verge of death. And so you're trying to minimize the chance that anybody wants to say that or thinks that it's appropriate to say that by clearly and unambiguously adding value. You're not saying this is the best team in the entire world, but clearly they're doing something useful. They're executing well. They're working hard. And of course that team should exist. Think about it, of course they should. But now once you do this, you have 30% of your extra time that you can plant all these seeds. You can find interesting little things where maybe a junior PM on the team has an idea you think it's kind of silly, but they're really into it. And the there is this thing, it could work out great actually. If you tweak it like this, there is a potential. I could see how that could work. If that PM is going to work on that anyway, they want to do it anyway. Instead of saying, "No, no, no, we don't have time for that. Be a little bit more productive over here," say, "Go for it. Here's my concerns. I imagine this part might not work, but this part is really cool right here." And then if it doesn't work, then they've stretched their agency.…

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