Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…So, we had Ray Dalio come to our executive offsite, and he walked us through how he and his company does strengths assessment. So he has a, that one is lot more accessible. I think it costs like $50. You can go to, I think you search for Ray Dalio's strengths, there's a website that you can go and... The way it works, slightly differently for executives because you do it, so those are your components, tells you how good you think you are, and then it has your leadership team vote you on certain different aspects. So, there's a two layer assessment, how good you think you are and how good everybody else think you are. And then, the overlap is where your true strengths are. And as a CEO, I can say, "Oh, Mayur is great at design. Everybody else knows that Mayur is great at design. We should give design problems to Mayur." Right? So, that's another way of kind of... So, there's a scientific way of doing this and it's gotten a lot better since I read that book long time ago. Again, if you're truly, truly curious, it doesn't take that long and now it's a lot more accessible. That's one way to do it. And it kind of separates in terms of execution, in terms of structured thinking, innovation and design, creativity, stakeholder management, EQ. You get a little bit of a more scientific picture on what your strengths are. But this is also a simpler way. As a PM, you do pretty much a large portion. Everybody does the same few things, right? You think you're designing the roadmap, you are coming up with what you think is the product strategy. There's a lot of time around just managing engineers, making sure they do stuff. There's stakeholder management, marketing, compliance, whatever. There's launch and just tracking data analytics. So, this part is true for most PMs. Some jobs require more of one versus the other. And you just know when you do these things, which ones one you're truly great at and you have a lot of fun doing, right? Maybe you just don't like Jira and the ticket tracking and just following people on that, and that's the worst part of your job. Stay away from more structured complex stakeholder management jobs. Or you find that, hey, you do really well at that and somebody ask you, "Hey, what are the 15 things we're going to do next week to improve a conversion?" That's where you kind of have a hard time, you just sit down, spend hours thinking about it, then maybe that's not your strength. And so over time, you kind of build this self calibration on areas that you have fun doing and areas where you don't have. And then, when you look at the next job, just try and gauge, are they hiring me because I did really well at some of the stuff that I didn't love doing? And if that's what they're hiring you for, probably you're not going to have a lot of fun or high acceleration if you go there. There's so much there. There's I think an important point that I'll add, and I'm curious if you agree. A lot of new people or new people in their career, like, "Oh, I just want to think about strategy. I'm going to think about the big picture. I don't want to just sit there and optimize the roadmap and be in Jira." But it's actually, that's your job when you're just starting out. You need to earn the right to contribute to the vision, to the strategy. There's one of the, and as a pre-conversation we talk about contrary and view, product strategy by definition seems like a... This is going to be controversial.…

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