Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. And I think Eric Weinstein coined this term high agency, which like once I discovered it kind of resonated a lot and kind of aligned with some of my ideas and the way I had defined this concept in my head for many years, that high agency is about finding a way to get what you want without waiting for conditions to be perfect. or otherwise blaming the circumstances, right? And so we've all seen such people. They just either push through in the face of adverse conditions, or often they manage to reverse the adverse conditions to achieve their goals. And so while this is an important trait for many areas and endeavors, I think this is particularly important for product managers because as product managers, we are constantly fighting adverse conditions. Not enough resources, challenges with legacy infrastructure, staffing issues, customer problems, and on and on, right? Like there is no dearth of problems to solve as a product manager. And I noticed consistently over the years that it wasn't the, you know, as I started thinking about sort of like what differentiates the PMs who've had just a large impact and even more important than just impact to the company or to the team, PMs who've surprised me in a positive way. PMs who really exceeded expectations, exceeded perhaps like their own capabilities on paper, right? Like you see somebody's credentials on paper and like then you see their work and their impact. And there's like a big difference between what you might assume on paper and the impact they're achieving. And also the reverse of that, which is sometimes you have PMs who just have tremendous potential. They look great on paper. And you know, when you're working with them or you're managing them, that they're not achieving that potential. They're nowhere close to achieving that potential. And as I look at both of those situations, it became clear to me that like high agency was a big contributor, which is the PMs in this first category were like, despite all the disadvantages and other things, they just took strong ownership. So ownership is one component. Ownership mindset is one component of high agency. They took strong ownership and then they creatively executed through the challenges. So a creative execution is another aspect of high agency. And they did that with a high degree of resilience, which is a third aspect of high agency. And so as I realized that, it became very clear as to why this was happening. And then it's one of those things that like once you see it, you start seeing it in people much more clearly. And so that's when I wrote about the PM version of high agency. I think that's why it resonated with a lot of people because it kind of like gave, again, it gave vocabulary to people for what they already kind of understood. And they had seen it, but did not have the words for it. I think that's a really good way to wrap this up. Just leaving people with that point of just the empowerment, basically taking responsibility, feeling high agency, resiliency. Shreyas, this has been incredibly illuminating. I suspect this is going to be helpful to a lot of product managers and even non-product managers. And so just two last questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out or learn more? And then how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, so follow me on Twitter. I'm just at Shreyas. If you don't have a Twitter account, follow me on LinkedIn. You can just find me there, Shreyas Doshi. If you really enjoy the tweets and want to see more, then you can super follow me on Twitter. So this is a smaller community that I'm really enjoying of product managers, founders, product people, designers, engineers, etc., where we go much deeper into these types of topics and more. And yeah, if you'd like to learn more about my views on various things related to product, super following me perhaps is a great way to do that. And in terms of other things I'm working on, I am going to be launching a course on product sense and product management later this year. So be on the lookout for that if that's of interest. And I think the best help I can ask for from listeners is just if any of these ideas resonated with you, share them with others. And of course, if there are questions, feel free to ask. But I think my mission here is to really help perhaps bring greater clarity on the what is going on around us when we're working in teams and working on projects and products. And so I really like it when people share the ideas, whether it's on Twitter or publicly or even with others privately. So that is perhaps the best thing you can do. Help me in my mission. Amazing.…

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