Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…So this is a book for people like us, product people who want to bring evidence guided thinking or modern product management if you like into their organizations. There's a lot of challenges, it's not simple, we all read the books, we all know the theory, we all know some parts of the system. It tries to give you a system how to do that, it's a meta framework that kind of helps you lift your organization in the direction of evidence guidance if that's what you want to do. So going back to the story briefly before we get into the frameworks and lessons of the book. In the first example of Google+, basically it came top down, "Hey, we need to build a social network, go build it. " Obviously that happens at a lot of companies, I don't know if there's an easy answer to this. But are there cases where it does make sense to approach it that way? Obviously Apple is a classic example of Steve Jobs, is like we need to build an iPhone. I don't know if that's exactly how it went. But are there instances where it is worth just approaching new product ideas that way based on the experience and creativity and insights of the founder? Or is your thinking it should always come from this evidence-based approach? I think the founders are very important, especially in the startup and scale-ups phase. They come up with many of the most important ideas and it's super important that they have the space to express and to push the organization to look at those. However, it's not about shutting them down it's about looking at them critically. You need to create the environment in the organization where the leader comes and says, "You know what? I talked to these three customers, I figured it out. Here's what we need to do in the next five years." And you need to ask, "Where's your evidence?" And by the way, the example you give that's a classic example. Steve Jobs, he just brainstorm in his kitchen the iPhone and then just told the team to build it. That's the story Steve Jobs, told but it's not the real story at all. Now we know what actually happened and the iPhone has actually a story of discovery, of trial and error, multiple projects to do it, multitouch with phones, most of them failed. Steve Jobs, was the architect. He kind of managed to connect the dots and eventually come up with this perfect device but he wasn't actually the creator, it wasn't his brainchild. He was actually against it for a while but over time as he saw the evidence, as he saw what this thing can do, as he saw the demos he was able to piece together something that was very useful.…

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