Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, it's true. But at the end of the day, neither Google's advertising revenue was affected, neither was Facebook affected. So it turned out this idea was not that necessary after all. Yeah, okay. So that's an example of something that didn't work because it was opinion based software, I think the phrase you used and then there's a different experience with tabs I think with Gmail. That's right. So Google, is a very successful company. It's not for me to criticize it or to in hindsight kind of say you guys need to be better and some of the people that were behind Google+ was some of the smartest leaders and I still think they are despite this story. If you look back at the history of Google, how things started in the first decade or so. Google, was what I call an evidence guided company. So essentially it put a high premium on focusing on customers, coming up with a lot of ideas on looking at the data, looking at how these ideas actually worked out. They weren't shy about launching betas and things that were very rough and incomplete and learning from that and then they expected people to take action based on the results. So fail fast is a very famous paradigm and so you had to kill your project or pivot it seriously if it didn't work out and I think had we kept fail fast it would've really have helped Google+, if we had this mentality. But for some reason with Google+, Google put this playbook aside and used a different playbook which I call plan and execute essentially. But I think inside Google the DNA still existed. So inside Gmail, the next project after Google+ was the tabbed inbox. So it was kind of the reverse of Google+, it started as a very small idea that no one believed in and we started looking what's behind the city? What's the goal? What's the problem actually we're trying to solve? It turned out that a lot of people were receiving social notifications and promotions, etc, and most of them were very passive. They weren't clearing their inbox, they were just living in this world of clutter and I came up with an idea how to fix this. I was sure it was great, I wanted to push it, plan and execute, but my colleagues were like, "Hold on, we actually tried this. We have a bunch of ideas to help people organize their inbox, they're not using it. Why is your idea good?" So that sent us, kind of me and my team into researching these users into establishing a goal that was much more user-centric and then thinking of other ideas. And then we started testing them much more rigorously and basically we started testing on our own inboxes and then we recruited other dog footers, other Googlers to test the same inbox, then we put it outside for external testers. We did usability studies, we did data, we built a whole data mining team and a whole machine learning team to build the right categorization and we ended up with a solution that turned out to be very successful for a lot of these passive users. This was a surprise to a lot of people because most of my colleagues and most of the people I talk with actually know how to manage their inbox. So for them that solution makes complete nonsense, like splitting promotions and social to the side sounds like the stupidest idea. But there's about 85% of the population, 85 to 88% that absolutely love it and today Gmail has about 1.8 billion active users according to Gmail.…

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