Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, that's a good one. This one is definitely an ongoing debate. So, I generally ask teams what's their impact? So, every quarter, every team, what... [inaudible 00:44:29] or Kristo will ask, "What did you ship?" And I generally ask, "How many people used it? What was the impact on volume?" Et cetera. And we have analyst teams that can answer this either with pre-post analysis, all kinds of techniques, or all through split tests. We generally have this, the debate is where the analysis slows us down, and we wouldn't make a decision off the back of the analysis. And then, this generally is what you said, where the team needs a validation, mainly for themselves, and maybe a little performance, but not too much. And so, there were ways in which you can maybe get some read on it that isn't quite as strong as a split test, which we'd use in these things. It's more just getting some... You can understand that people worried when you do split tests that slow down the release of something, but in order to get impact, if you know you're not going to roll it back, then okay, you should just roll it out, and try to reduce the need for that validation. I think that there's an interesting correlation between products that grow through word of mouth, and less need to experiment with everything. Airbnb is also actually 70% of growth is word of mouth from the last stat that I heard. And then you think about all these social consumer apps, they mostly grow through people sharing with their friends, and a lot of them come from just the founder's intuition of what a great product's going to be. I think about Snapchat, and the recent mobile social apps. And so I think maybe there's something there about just as a founder, trusting your gut more often. But then it becomes difficult as you grow. You have to delegate, and then you have to trust people on your team making the right decisions. I guess, is there anything there that you've learned about just trusting individual product teams to make decisions that you can't for sure know are positive or negative without running experiments? So, as I say, almost everything we do, we have some way of understanding the impact. So, that's always there. We definitely have things where the team does something where Kristo or I will say, "This is just crazy. There's no way they're going to use this." And then we have a culture where people are encouraged to do these things, if they believe in it.…

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