Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, I mean, I can tell you a little bit about how we manage our backlog, which I think actually ties directly into this. At any given moment, we have probably 20 or 30 opportunities that we could possibly explore, just product opportunities, like problems to solve, areas to improve for our users, but they're not ready yet. We don't have enough conviction around how we might approach it. So, we just accumulate understanding of this stuff and periodically, we accumulate some more stuff, and then we reevaluate, "Okay, what is our current understanding of how we might best approach this thing?" And I think something that people struggle with is that they might have this model in their head. Like a PM might have this model in their head about how a user behaves, but it's just very hard to share that with someone else. You have to telepathically throw it into their brain, which is hard. So, what we try to do is identify areas that we might attack with a product, but also keep an up-to-date analysis of each of those areas so that everyone can engage with it and also contribute. Is there an example of something that's sitting in your roadmap? I don't know if you could share these sort of things that's just sitting in the backlog of just like, "We're not quite ready to tackle this yet, but here's something we're inkling on. " Yeah, sure. Capacity planning is a thing that's been sitting in our backlog, and it's something that we see managers struggle with all the time, which is like I have a limited amount of personnel and resources, and I need to deploy them in such a way where we can theoretically accomplish our roadmap, but also we don't get blocked by some bottleneck that we don't end up blocking all of the projects because this one engineer is stuck on some info thing, and that's a thing people struggle with all the time. All the solutions out there are bad. The best solution is a very, very custom spreadsheet that someone would make, and it's a lot of upkeep. So, we have some ideas about how we might automate this, how we might use existing data within Linear to really help out with this problem, but I don't think we've quite cracked it yet. I think there's some nuances that we have to really explore a little bit further. So, we're continuously developing this, and as we hear from hear from users that are struggling with this problem, we will get on a call with them and sit down with them and talk through it.…

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