Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…So, I think going through those three ingredients should help shape that answer, right? Because if you're like, "Okay, well, the first one is super strong, the channel DNA is maybe really early and I've got a small to mid-size team and maybe only one channel working," then it may be like, "Great. Put half of one person into this, because it's maybe interesting. But don't put any more than that into it." Versus if it's like, "Man, this is a killer fit the channel's a little further along and I have a 20 person team, so I'm going to put three dedicated people to this, because we are in prime position to be the leaders in this new channel and really push it." So, I think it's figuring those pieces out, because it is a very it depends answer, but rarely ever is it like, "Hey, this should be your entire team's focus for the next three sprints or five sprints." I think that if you've got that half person working on it for a while and there starts to be some magic happening, sure, put a sprint or two against it as a whole team. But generally speaking, I think keeping it minimum at first is my typical recommendation. I had another guest, Yuri, who I think from former Grammarly, and he made a really good point that it's often better not to try something than to do it badly and then take away the wrong lessons. I guess, in your experience, what's a timeframe you think people should put into this stuff? You said two sprints, maybe a couple weeks. I don't know, what's the range of just maybe don't spend more than X months on something new if it's not clearly working, just based on your experience. Generally I wouldn't let anything bleed past a quarter. You can probably get some good signal in a month or less, what I would call fishing. It wouldn't be like you're just putting bait in the water to figure out where the fish are, not necessarily getting statistically significant repeatable solutions. The big variables that can change that timing, so if I'm exploring a new video channel, the content I need to create is if I'm going to have to create something that takes three weeks to produce and $20,000 to make, I may want to give it a little more time, because I gave it more of an upfront investment. Versus if it's like I want to put text ads in podcasts listings or something like that. It's like, great, I can do that by myself at midnight and it's not distracting anybody or anything. And if it doesn't work in three weeks, let's move on. But generally ideally what you're working through, and we'll touch a little bit more on this with the Growth CMO, is that this should all be part of a roadmap. It shouldn't just be randomly chosen and thrown at. This should be part of your sprint process and you should have a backlog of other things that you want to try. And so you're actually weighing that decision of how long based on what other opportunities you're missing out on by investing in that. But I would say most channels, especially new ones, are going to take more than a couple cycles to kind of suss out. Because there's no rules, there's no playbooks yet on how to do them well. So, give it a little bit of time, but if you're going over a quarter and you don't feel like directionally it's getting better or it's interesting, I would put it back on ice for a while.…

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