Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…So much of user experience practice, not just research, but design too, is focused on empathy and very user-centered. This is beautiful. I'm not saying that we should abandon that. I think what I'm saying is there's an overlapping event, where you have the user and profit or the business. And what researchers need to do is be way more explicit about finding that overlap. So one thing, when researchers ask for advice, they're like, "Well, what should I do to be more business or profit focused?" I say something like, "Did you read the last quarterly report, If it's a public company? Did you listen to the shareholder call?" And they're probably like, "No, it's full of a bunch of language I didn't quite get." And I'm like, "Yep." So there you go. That's the language you need to learn. Scour your Google Drive folder, your internal folder and look for all of the documents that are about this quarter, or this halves, or next half strategy. What are the OKRs? Understand the metrics and the conversion funnel, know it back and forward, because then what you're doing is you're proposing, if you're in the active conversation, you're saying, 'Cool, I hear you asking that research question. I've identified this is exactly the spot in the funnel where I think we need to do work. There's an opportunity here. Or that competitor is eating our lunch with this group of users. I know that because I read the competitive report and I understand it deeply.'" So those are skills that some researchers have and a lot are building these days, but historically, last 15 years, it hasn't been a thing we've been as focused on, and I think that's an evolution that needs to happen. I think a lot of PMs listening to this are going to be like, "Hallelujah." This is exactly what I've been trying to convince people of. It's what I've been trying to convince my researchers of, and design often falls into this. But Lenny, the opposite is true, too, because you got to take the average PM who lives in that land, all day, every day, and what they do is not in the Venn. I think those are people who are also performing customer centricity and performing user-centeredness a lot, when they're really not interested. And so this is not about researcher. This takes two sides. Fixing this broken system takes everyone, researchers, PMs, designers, everyone at a company, but also the way that organization is structured, and integrating itself in a different way. Everybody's got to come to the table.…

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