Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…, or you hire in somebody who knows what they're doing. So when I started working with Insight, our premise was, we will never touch a company, or be in a company hands-on, for more than three months. The idea was, within that three months, we hire in a chief product Officer to take the helm, and we do just enough to keep it on track, playing an interim CPO role, to make sure that they can keep delivering, they can keep growing. We'd have just enough of a roadmap to keep the teams moving. We train them a little bit, we'd help implement some processes. We'd help get all the information a CPO would need so that when they walked into that organization, they could read the background on their customers, understand what the strategy is so far, look at the current roadmap, watch some customer interviews, know who to talk to, get the lay of the land and have some people working on stuff. And then they could take the time they need to actually build a strategy that's going to help grow the company. So really, at the end of the day, when you need some help, you realize something is not working but you're not sure how to make it right. And then, you can either hire in a leader... Sometimes the question is what kind of leader. That's when you try to hire consulting, get some outside expertise on that. Or, if you want to hire an interim CPO type person, you have to understand that's very temporary, unless you're trying to convert that person into a full-time, which is totally fine if you want to do that and have those expectations going in. But consultants can only help as well when you're willing to take action. So I tell some companies as well at the beginning, you're not ready for this unless you are ready to take action. And sometimes that's drastic change. Sometimes that's changing up people. Sometimes you look at your organization and say, this isn't the organization that's going to get me to the next level, so we're going to have to make some changes, we're going to have to hire in some more senior people as well who can help train the masses of other people that need training. We're going to have to make some hard decisions, and you have to reevaluate your strategy a lot of the times, and figure out how to set course with that too. I've met a lot of organizations that think most of their issues are in the training of their people. And 99% of the time, I see that it's actually in the way that they're setting their goals and deploying their strategy. Because once you train those people, they have no context on what to work towards. So it's such a holistic approach when you actually go through these transformations, or try to set up a product organization. So you either need somebody in there to do it, or you've got to really be ready to move when somebody comes in to help you. I was going to save these questions for later, but it's as good a time as any to get into them around strategy, which your book is about, I would say, is the fact that people just build features, features, features, and don't really have a strategy or aren't using a strategy. And so, just spending a little time there, what are signs that your team or your company either doesn't have a strategy or aren't using their strategy? Yeah, that's a fair question. Signs that there are no strategy, teams are all working like dogs. They're working 80 hours a week. I see this all the time. People are heads down, crunching, crunching, crunching, releasing, releasing, releasing. Or sometimes not releasing, but they're working like crazy and none of the metrics are moving. So the executive team is going, what is happening? Product is a black box. Tech is a black box. We've got all these people. What do they do all day? A great example of when there is no strategy. And what usually is happening is there's this missing middle. It's like, we all know exactly what each team... We don't all know, actually, what each team is working on. The teams all know exactly what they're working on, which is usually some kind of feature enhancement, new features, whatever you've got. Bug fixes, all that wonderful stuff. The people they report to usually know what the teams are doing, but the executives are like, cool, how does that matter to our business? How does that actually ladder up into our vision, where we want to go, our objectives for the year, our goals? Great sign that there is actually no strategy deployed correctly. Now, when I say, too, there's no strategy, there's usually some kind of strategy, but it lives in people's heads, and they're really bad about writing it down and getting it out. So I always tell people, too, if you think that there's no strategy, go interrogate people for awhile. Go talk to the leaders. Is this good if we hit these numbers? Is this bad? Why? If I release this thing, what do you think will happen? What numbers will change? What behaviors will change? How will this make us better? I usually can pull out what people believe the goals to be, and sometimes they're just not explicitly written down. So that's an exercise that I typically do, too, when I don't see strategy well-manifested in these organizations. I just go in and I say, okay, what does good look like for you? Where is the vision and where are we going? And I ask all of these questions, too, to a lot of people. And you find that there's different answers across the organization, and that shows a lack of alignment on a complete strategy, as well. I once asked all the executive team at a healthcare company, what's the vision for this company? And they said, to be the backbone of healthcare. And I said, what does that mean? And they couldn't elaborate. Nobody could elaborate on that. And I said, cool, that's a tagline, but it's not a vision. What are we manifesting into? What are we doing? What are we not doing? Who do we want to be when we grow up? Five to ten years from now, how are we different than we are today? Those things, more often than not, are not written down, and they're not clearly communicated. So one of the exercises we do is we write. If I see that there's no strategy, I have CEOs write two-pagers on where did the company come from? How is it different today?…

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