Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…els, voice information. Again, if you didn't self-center and you were not afraid to poke the bear, you had an ability to voice information. So from that sense, lots of information that came bottom up. But then at the same time, there was also a lot of conviction and intuition and context that came top down. And because for a lot of these decisions, there was so much conversation. The reality is I think the way we operate was actually somewhere more towards the middle on a day-to-day basis. Which is why for me, I thought it was great. We had a boss on the podcast, CTO of Meta. And I always thought of Meta as a very bottom up organization where anyone can run experiments, they're shipping things all the time. He's like, no, we're very top down. We tell people, here's the things we're building this year. Here's our big bets, here's what we're going to prioritize. And so I think to your point, a lot of people don't necessarily understand what that means and see things as bottom up versus top down. Any other pros and cons? Just real quick on working this way? I think a lot of people are... A lot of founders are like, maybe I should move my company this way. Maybe I should just be involved in everything. Maybe we need to move PMs to product marketing managers. Is there anything else that's maybe a pro or a con in this approach that might be worth sharing? Yeah. I mean, I think what you need to recognize, right? Is which decisions and what part of the company do you have special... Like do you spike on and where you have edge and where you can help make the best decision. And then I would argue then as a leader, then it is your job to be involved in those decisions, right? For Brian, he always spiked in product, in design and marketing, right? So he was very natural. He was basically the CPO, right? That's why he was in all those decisions because those were his spikes and that's where he helped everybody move forward in a certain direction. I think for founders, you just need to recognize what do you spike on? What are the specific things that you have, this great insight that other people do not and immerse yourself in a lot of those decisions, right? And there's some things that you might need to let go of, right? That are maybe not as important or maybe certain things that you won't add much to the conversation, and you have someone who you trust who's going to uphold a certain quality bar or whatever, whatever. So it's just being thoughtful about where you spend your time and leverage your strengths, basically.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.