Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…This idea of getting unstuck and turning maybe some abstract ideas or some concepts that you've been discussing, turning that into a concrete prototype, something that you can look at and you can click around and you can actually try. It works in a lot of different contexts, and we've heard amazing stories from people who read the book and have run Sprints at companies that have a hundred thousand people and governments and all sorts of different organizations, but the stories that are in Sprint are about working with startups. We think this is especially valuable for startups because typically you've raised a certain amount of money which buys you a certain amount of runway. You have a certain amount of time to prove that you have product market fit to prove that the thing that you're making is the right thing for some customers. And so the faster you can do that, the more quickly you can find out if you're on the right track, the more quickly you can learn and you can course correct and ultimately you can get to a better place faster than if you spent months working on that prototype or that first version of the product before releasing it. I think what's awesome about it is as a product manager, the idea of containing a new idea experiment to five days versus this ongoing teams distracted on this idea just like, "Cool, we're going to spend a week, see where this goes. They're not going to spend months exploring. We're not going to talk about it. And just in theory, let's just try it." I think it's really powerful. And so for folks that may want to explore this until we do a follow-up episode, is it just by the book, is there anything else you could point them to think about this idea and implementing it? Yeah. Well, if you are thinking about, or in the very early stages of starting a company, a great thing to do is to get in touch with us at character.vc. And actually we're just opening up applications to our labs program. So character.VC/labs. Our labs program is an intensive program for startups, and we will run a sequence of Sprints including some new formats that are not in the book, but are excellent. This will be our third time running through this. We found that it's especially valuable for AI startups. So it just turns out that a lot of the complex issues you have to figure out with turning something that may not initially be trustworthy may require a big behavior shift to customers who aren't used to working in this way and sometimes artificial intelligence can produce things that feel kind of alien to people. And so making this stuff actually useful, more than just a chatbot with little stars that's in the corner that says, "Hey, would you like to ask the AI a question about this?" But something that's really meaningful, doing this kind of repeated and we'd run a sequence of Sprints doing it again and again, you work with directly with John and I, we find a really powerful way to get started. Anyway, that's a big advertisement for Character Labs. But yeah, in general, check out the book. Also, would say if you're not quite ready to dip your toe in the whole book, you can go to the sprintbook.com. And we have a ton of resources on there, including a new thing, which is a Miro board, a Miro template that I created that has step-by-step instructions for every single step as well as 30+ videos of me explaining each step and actually I think I'm wearing the same sweatshirt in those, so if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see more of me in this sweatshirt in that template. And that's free, that's free and there's a bunch of resources on the website that are free as well. So anybody, everybody should be able to access this stuff.…

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