Chris Hutchins: belief

Transcript context

…Awesome. So here's my big question. What have you learned? You spent a lot of time thinking about big bets, big innovations, working within a company to come up with something totally new. What have you learned about how to approach that within a larger company? How do I successfully innovate? How to think about launching big bets, how to structure teams, anything along those lines? I've learned a few things and I think some of them I've learned came naturally being a founder before being a PM. But you think that customer research is all you need to build a product at a company, but figuring out how to create excitement internally and get buy-in from other teams because they're the ones that are going to build it. They're the ones that are going to help market. It's all a team effort. Sometimes you get caught up, at least I found, as a PM of like, "Oh, we got the customer insights, we did the testing. It's all positive." And then you show the ratings you got from sub survey or the engagement or some clips and that's not the end of it. The end is creating this compelling vision for what you're building. And then the thing I learned from being a founder is, gosh, you have to state your vision and your mission and why you're here, every all-hands. It seems so crazy because it's core to you why we would build this, what it's purposes, why it's amazing. But as a founder, I was like every week I was like, "Hey everybody, before we get started, this is the mission we're on, this is why we're doing it. This is the thing we're doing in the world." And as a PM sometimes you're like, "Well, I told people three weeks ago and I put it in that email that I sent out to everyone and it was in the top of the PRD, so why hasn't everyone understood why this product exists?" And I realized very quickly that, that same thing is true. So if you want to make a big bet, if you want to make a big impactful product, you have to bring people along with you. And your ability to speak publicly, persuade people, build influence within the company. Those things are all as important as your ability to identify a user need and build a product that solves it. Awesome. This reminds me a lot of Airbnb, where the founders, all-hands share the vision and the strategy that they came up with that year. Every single all-hands. And it's always like, "Yeah. Yeah, we know. We know." But to your point, it's so powerful and important.…

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