Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…That's correct. It's giving yourself time to do this, because if you think about it, the output is determined by the quality of your input. I love, it feels like a core component of this method is spend time creating, gathering all the input, all the best input, actually spend time there. Don't just make it a half-assed last minute thing. Okay. Amazing. Okay, let's talk about step two, which is the strategy sprint. Yeah, so the strategy sprint is the heart of the process. This is sort of where you make the decision. If you recall, the definition of strategy is it forces choice to deploy resources into a few areas for maximum impact. The core of strategy is really picking those areas and the areas you're not going invest in. That happens in the strategy sprint, so really it's the heart of the process. Typically, it's like a three to five day process. The first day is the share out date. Everybody has done some great work. They go in, they share what they've collected, what they've sort of learned. It brings everybody in the working group to the same state of understanding, the same state of consciousness on the state of the union. That's a great process where what I encourage people to do is write down things that you are, as you're listening, write down things that you find are problems for our users, things that are coming in the way of our growth and things that are sort of suboptimal for the business. People take a lot of notes during that time and the people who are presenting are sharing everything they've learned. That's really day one. It's just absorbing a ton of information and writing down a ton of notes so people can kind of understand where all the problems are. It's a very problems focused process, and that's an important point. I'll get back to it when we talk about big S, which is different. Once people have that common awareness, shared knowledge of all the problems, day two is literally the most important day in the entire 8 to 12 weeks because that's where you actually make the choice. The way to flow through it, it's actually really important to flow through it correctly. The first step is really generating a whole bunch of problems, because people have been taking notes the previous day. You start the day with, "Hey, let's collect everybody's thoughts on what the problems are that are holding us back." It's a free flowing session. Everybody throws out their observations on what's holding us back, and you just capture all of that in a Google Sheets, for example. Over even an hour, you start to see these patterns emerging of like, there's these clusters of problems that are really holding us back. The next step is you do a joint clustering of related problems and you create these potentially, typically in my experience, I've seen about 10 to 15 clusters form of very related problems. The beauty of it is each of those bigger cluster, you actually know what the sub problems are within that cluster because you sort of generated it very organically. Then you have, let's say 10 to 15 clusters. What you then do is you, because remember, because it started as a problem generation exercise, each of the clusters also has a name that is a problem, and so the next step is to flip it into an opportunity framing. Let me give you a couple of examples.…

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