Evidence receipt / recommendation
Published · transcript-backedMentions personal use of Google Home.
18 May 2025 Lenny's Podcast Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada
“Not so funny. That's exactly what I use my Google Home for, so basic. I don't do the trivia thing now maybe I got to give this shot.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Lenny Rachitsky
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- recommendation
- Recorded
- 18 May 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Underpants. Exactly, right? So I do feel like there's a temptation to rush and say to go to scale before solve. So I've always said to my teams solve before scale. So what that does mean is there's a different posture and different mode when you're trying to solve a problem versus scaling something that's either post-product market fit or even at least in roughly in the ballpark. So to give you a couple of examples, I think when you look at the solved stage, there are wide lurches. You got to be very comfortable with the fact that you're day one thinking about, "Hey, a plant detection tool." And then day 15, you're like, "Oh, actually, the tech is really good for translating foreign language." By the way, this is not hypothetical. This is what we kind of looked at in Google Lens back then and said, "Okay, what is the intersection and so on?" So from the outside, it looks like chaos, but actually, in the... And you should be very comfortable... Not only tolerant, I think you should have an appetite for that because the last thing you want is prematurely fix on one local hill. And then you're climbing that in start-ups and entire product areas and companies, big companies make that mistake and three years later you're like, "Oh, how do I get off this hill?" So I'd say that's one big counterintuitive. When you're trying to think about what mode you're in, are you in the solved mode? Are you in the scale mode? One example is kind of making sure that you're comfortable with the chaos. I think the other lesson I've learned is the danger of metrics. And I think again, if you have worked on Google Search or if you worked on Office products, you really have a very fine-grained sense of what are the metrics for this product? You have the input metrics out, you have the whole shebang, but when you're looking at something zero-to-one. If you decide on a metric two prematurely, that's false precision first of all, right? I mean, CTR. When you have a thousand people, it doesn't mean anything. Retention also may not mean anything. So really being very wary of this big guy, big girl of grownup metrics as I call it, right? You are looking for more qualitative, the sound of click, and what is your... The other kind of the handler uses, what is your set timer and play music? So if you look at Alexa and Siri and Google Assistant and all these things, they had a very promising broad interface. You could say anything, but I think there was one or two things that it was really good at. You could set a timer, you could play music, and you could play trivia. And so you've got to nail those things before you say, "Oh yeah, here you can do anything with it," which is not a good recipe. Not so funny. That's exactly what I use my Google Home for, so basic. I don't do the trivia thing now maybe I got to give this shot. Got to try that. Yeah.…
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