Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Absolutely. Pick the things that you really care about, and it is absolutely okay to say no. Awesome. I definitely want to get to Facebook Marketplace questions, but one last question while we're on this topic is Women in Product, which is an organization that I believe you co-founded and you're on the board and you run. And it's such an awesome organization that I look for every opportunity to collaborate with, we've been doing partnerships on meetups and be giving away subscriptions. I'd love to just get an overview of what this organization is, what kind of work it does, and then just how folks can get involved if they're not already involved. Women in Product was born when I was at Facebook. We actually had less than 10% women product managers, but I started out my career at PayPal. The head of product was woman, the head of product at eBay was a woman. A lot of the directors at one point, Amy Klement, who was the VP of product at PayPal, 100% of her direct staff who were product managers. All the product directors were women around her table. And when I went to Facebook, I was really confused, what happened to all the women? And in fact, I'm going to actually enter through product marketing and some of the most successful PMs at the company. Naomi and Fiji also came in through product marketing. We could not be product managers at a company where we eventually we not only ran our own product teams, but also engineering. We were just wondering what happened. One of the things that we did was because we wanted to recruit more women product managers and we wanted to network with more women product managers, we started doing these dinners, and we hosted these dinners for years. Our first dinner was years before we started Women in Product in 2016. The dinners started maybe in 2012. And for years, we would host quarterly dinners. We'd invite everyone we knew, we'd invite other people to invite other people, and we would just get together and talk and connect and get to know each other and so many friendships were born of that. And then one night we were thinking, were talking about who was going to Grace Hopper. We said, "Why don't we have a PM conference of our own?" And suddenly a group of strangers at a dinner said, "We're going to start our own conference." I don't know, it's pretty crazy to do that. But we got a group together and a lot of those women are still on the board. And we started a conference. I remember when we were putting together this conference, a lot of the event planners that were helping us from Facebook were like, "You shouldn't do a conference. You're not going to have anyone who wants to come. Maybe you should just do an evening event or something." But at that point, we had announced it, so we were committed. So when we opened up registration, almost 4,000 people applied for 300 slots and we thought, and I remember Ami Vora saying, "That's what product market fit looks like, and what do we do now?" One of the things that we needed to do was to first put on a conference, we had no idea how to do it. We had no organization, we had nothing. And I just remember thinking, this is amazing. There's so much hunger for this. So we started a Facebook group and we just saw women just starting the communities form around it. We didn't do that much, but people would find each other jobs, they would coach each other for interviews and they would help each other and network. And that's really incredible about these communities is they're organic?…

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