Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…I don't know if there's a hard and fast rule here. I can just maybe say what made sense and didn't make sense in our context. The issue for us at the time was that we took people away from the investment in our core product to go do those other things. We moved people, right? And so the trap there is that you leave yourself ripe for disruption in your core because someone else can out invest you in that core. And so if you, you're the leader in some core product, our takeaway here is you should continue to out invest everyone else in that core, and then invest the profits that come out of that core into the next venture. Invest profits and not people, or venture capital, which is maybe net present value of profits or something to that effect. But don't take people away from the core to go to these other things because then you end up distracted. And the other aspect of that is that those secondary products we took on were in categories of their own. And it's really tempting and you'll often get dragged into accidentally entering another category, and then you'll end up building these bolt-on products that are the best in their category, right? And the adjacent categories for analytics are CDPs or message targeting or feature flagging or something, but there's not that many people that need the sixth best CDP or the eighth best feature flagging or the 10th best message targeting tool. And it ends up being, in aggregate will contribute five to 10% to your revenue, won't seriously accelerate your growth rate, and then takes engineers away from the core product. And so those were the circumstances that we were. And I think if you're seeing churn to your competitor on your core product and you're not best in class on any of the other ones, then maybe it's time to reevaluate. And then the last thing I'll say there is that it's also 10x more painful than you think to cut mild successes than anything else, and just organizationally painful. And there's teams that have whole roadmaps, and it's a really painful experience, so you have to think really hard before you kick those off. That is really, really insightful advice, makes me think about if you bundle good enough solutions, there needs to be kind of this anchored tenant that I will not give this thing up and I'll use the third best version of something else, if you have it. But if you're not that valuable and important, you're not going to convince people to use something because they're competing against the best in every category. Exactly. Yeah.…

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