Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…It's two things. So you'll hear me say product management is clarity and conviction. And in writing the headline, you have to focus. Headline is not like... It's not a PRD, right? It's a headline. So when I've done this, what is the impact of this going to be? What's the feeling [inaudible 00:23:56] people with? And it forces you to get to that clarity of, okay, we solved this problem. This is actually going to be the painkiller that we're solving. And then they translate that pain dealer into, they have a headache, they no longer have a headache. Do you know what I mean? So I think it breaks clarity. So for me, as the PM I'm like, this is why I'm saying this is important. Then you have the subtitled. So they'll usually have the headline and I'm like, sub bit. They've just launched a way to something something, and you have to write that as well. What is the thing we're launching and is that realistic? And then using that to kind of socialize the idea to say, "This actually could work, right?" And I didn't go off and build it. Somebody else went and did it, but we had already thought about it and bit that into our platform vision of we need to be able to support these different kinds of ways to pay. There's another interesting one that you're going to go to. The third one, which is write the story. Write the article that someone else will write or visualize it, right? And the visualize it, two things actually happened. One a year and a half ago, in a strategy session I was running at YouTube, i... The strategy session I was running at YouTube, I actually took a screenshot of the Google Play Store. I mean, I use an iPhone, but I worked at Google, so I was trying to be... So I took the Google Play Store and then I created rounded rectangles, just blank rectangles, four panels. And then I printed that out and I gave everyone a sheet and I said, "If we solve these problems, we solve all these problems that we've identified, what would be the screenshots?" You know when you go on the app store, it has the make money or express yourself, what are we trying to say and what is the mock, the hero mock, the marquee mock that we're showing? And then again, it forces people to, oh goodness, we can't show everything, so it's got to be three or four things that land the big rocks that will solve this problem. Right? So everyone did theirs and then we talked about it and what was interesting is you'll find two or three that everyone comes up with if you've done a good job of telling a story around the problems. And it actually quite beautiful to see. So that's a very simplistic visualization that's not like a beautiful sketch or video. I really like that as just a reminder that when you're even the article approach of announcing the thing instead of the traditional press release or even a Tech Wrench article, it's where will people find out about the thing you've built, and then use that as a way to frame what you've done. So in your case, it's like the app store. They're going to see this update in the app store. Let's just see what that would look like as we announce it in the app store. Could end up being a tweet, could end up being podcasts. There's all these different channels. So I think that gives people more ways of telling the story. If it's not going to be a press release. Then yeah, so you talked about this third approach of mocking up essentially the vision. I always feel like if you have a designer helping you craft your vision, it's such a unfair advantage. So definitely try to a rope a designer in to help you tell a story. Absolutely.…

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