Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…The functional organization structure of big tech has kind of separated product managers from the product development process in many ways. They're not looking at data because data scientists are doing that. They're just parsing some of the reports that they get back. They're mainly just writing documents and then kind of being the team secretary and running around, getting approvals from each cross-functional team, legal privacy, everything like that. And yeah, you're actually very much separated from the product itself. And so I think what Snapchat has done, and I think Apple too, to the same extent, is that designers run the show. And I think that's led to some very novel- And I think that's led to some very novel products coming out from both of those companies. But I mean that is its own host of problems because actually rolling out a product inside of a large organization, it requires a sheer force of will because it's a lot of work. I mean, there's a lot of regulatory scrutiny, scaling it up. You do need someone to project manage. And so I don't know if it's the silver bullet as to give designers the reign to run the show, but I also don't think the current traditional like Google, Facebook style of being team secretaries is also the best solution. To defend product managers, I think many product managers spend a lot of time in design, spend a lot of time with data science. I think probably what you saw is like the extreme big, big, big tech version of product management. I know even PMs at Facebook can if they want to spend time with design. I think it's just obviously very different from a startup world where you're just, that's all you're doing. Yeah, it's certainly an exaggerated view, but it's particularly relevant I think for all the zero to one initiatives because if you're a product manager on a standalone app inside of a large, like you should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything. And then yeah, it should be cleaned up prototype by a technical designer, but that's your idea. And products live and die in the pixels, like consumer products, so that's on you. And that's where I think for maybe larger growth initiatives, yes, you can be a little more detached from the pixels.…

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