Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I'm not sure I would've been able to articulate it as succinctly as you did just now, but I think that is the feeling that I had that it's not my place anymore. I don't have a canvas to try and exert my dreams on this place. I think Elon took that mantle, and I'm excited to see what he going to do with it is the feeling I had. Yeah. You've touched on this. You're known for at Twitter someone that turned the culture of the product team and Twitter in general from a very stagnant, nothing-is-changing product to shipping all the time, all kinds of stuff. So, here's a list of stuff that I've gathered your team shipped while you were there. Twitter Blue, which is I think called Premium now, Spaces, Super Follows, Communities, newsletters, topics, fleets, being able to see Instagram photos in line, testing reactions, edge-to-edge photos, tons of UX improvements, and obviously, live video. What did you learn about how to change a product culture from a company that's very risk-averse and essentially just not shipping a lot to taking big, bold bets and becoming a lot more open to new stuff? Trying to drive culture change is both one of the most challenging things and rewarding things. For the first year of my role ... There was a chapter of my time at Twitter, maybe just to backup, that was just leading Periscope. In that first chapter of maybe two years, I was not really involved with Twitter stuff all that much. That started to change when we really tried integrating Periscope with Twitter, but chapter two of my time at Twitter was when I became the head of product. That first year of being the head of product was one of the most difficult of my career not because the work was difficult, but because it was so politically and bureaucratically exhausting to try and change culture in a way that just there wasn't alignment around. It comes back to the point I was making earlier around the organization of the company was functional, and so it is one thing for me to have some ideas and a plan and a strategy that I felt compelling. But when you have to essentially drive consensus amongst your peers across the other functions, that's a different game. That's not execution. That's politics and consensus building. I both can't stand that stuff, but I think ... This is going to sound like I'm tooting my own horn, but good enough at it and I have enough patience at it that I invested the time and the energy. I think a less patient person wouldn't have bothered and would've thrown their hands up. I think honestly, a lot of it just comes down to I had practice. At my first company that I started in college with one of my best friends, Joe, who I ended up co-founding Periscope with, we got acquired by a big, public, ad tech company called Blackboard, and we were 19 at the time. We got thrown into a public ... I was a senior executive at a public company that was not your quintessential tech company. It was even more difficult to get things done. So, through the four years I spent there, I learned a lot about how to navigate that type of environment. It all came coming back when I was given the product role at Twitter. That first year of changing culture was like- ... product role at Twitter. That first year of changing culture was like walking through mud, and it was really difficult. But I think when we started building that alignment and building excitement that like, oh, actually maybe we should be taking some bigger swings, and when we started seeing through the execution against some of those plans, I think it ended up, it got easier and easier. It becomes addicting. I think people end up feeling like, oh wow, maybe these sacred cows we had didn't need to be so sacred. And so I think after that first year, it became a lot more fun. It was still difficult, but it felt like we were all swimming in the same direction a lot more. But I think my takeaway there is you can't change culture without having alignment from the top. It's difficult to change culture when you have a pocket of a company trying to advocate for change.…

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