Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Honestly, I think learn product development. Go learn agile product development. And there's actually a book called Hacking Marketing, I think. I'll confirm. But it's essentially how to run a marketing team on Agile. That to me is just, again, any great marketing leader should be able to go and consume how to do product development, how to run a product like sprints and those types of things. And their mind, if they're great marketing CMO or a CMO, will be like, "Oh my gosh, I could do this with this big event that we want to host. I could do this with everything." There's nothing off the table when you actually learn those fundamentals. But as well as I know smart people can learn that stuff. There's lots of resources out there. Reforge has some classes on it, there's a bunch of new product led growth classes out in the wild, like Maven I think has a couple. And there's a variety of those types of things that just going and doing it, you don't have to go and operate it yourself. You don't have to go become a product manager. But understanding those skills and those systems will, one, I think make you think differently about how to run your marketing team and, two, make you exponentially better at working with your product organization. Awesome. I'm actually hearing from folks listening to this podcast not live right now, but broadly, that this is a good way to learn how product works and how product leaders think. So, that's interesting. So, if you're listening to this, good job. You also mentioned that a lot of marketing leaders don't work out at a company, they join, they leave, things go wrong. As a hiring founder or leader, what do you look for to tell you this person's probably not what we need and not what you'd call a Growth CMO? What are flags that are like they're probably not going to adapt and evolve to the way we want to operate? So, I think first and foremost, it obviously depends on the stage. Anything let's say C or below, comfortable with chaos and willingness to go do something they have not done for probably 15 years are two huge signals for me, because every company I've been part of at every scale now, which is all of them basically, that's the thing that a lot of people coming from more traditional marketing environments into startup worlds, it's a pace and just the unpredictability and change and those kinds of things are just at such a higher rate than they've seen for a long time that it can be really jarring for people. And I think it's totally reasonable. It's crazy, right? If anybody that's had the exposure on both sides. And then the willingness to go do the work. People are churning constantly and the challenges are different every week and those types of things. And so it's like every now and then you've got to go write an email or you've got to go open up Facebook and get into the weeds with it with your team, into the data of it and that type of stuff. And that's stuff that I don't want to do, personally, me. I'm past the point where I should be in Facebook. But man, when I need to, I'm willing to, and I'll go get in the weeds with it and I'll use my time to just be like, "Look, we have to figure this out now." And I'm going to go do the things that I thought I was done with in my career. So, those are pretty big ones. I think then generally speaking, one of the exercises I like to take founders through when they're hiring a marketing leader is every marketer is going to have a T-shaped career. Everybody came from something they probably became awesome at and then over time just expanded their purview. So, for me it was mobile. I got into mobile. My first client ever was on Sun Microsystems early 2000s, getting Java developers to make apps for flip phones. So, I just knew digital mobile world really, really well before a lot of people did. But then eventually I'm like, "Great, now I'm running an entire digital marketing team. Now I'm running an entire marketing team. Now I'm getting into growth. Now I want to learn product," and I've expanded. And so typically it's going through that exercise of find out their T, find out their strength, and then spend time figuring out how they make up for those other things. So, for me, at Lambda school I ran our PR team for a while. I am not a PR person, but I make it a goal in my life to get to the valley of despair of the Dunning-Kruger effect, to be like, "Great, I just need to know how bad I am at PR," because if I still think I'm good at it, that's not a good place for me to be. But once I know how bad it is, I now know I need to go hire the right person to come in and I'm going to listen to them. I'm not going to assume that I'm smarter than them, and those types of things.…

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