Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…But I know you've written about this as well and you've put a spotlight on vision. So I'd be curious as to how you see the mission and the vision playing together. Yeah. I think the most important thing is people just get stuck on these and try to define them and make them perfect. And I think the most important thing is just don't overthink it. Just put something that sounds right and people are excited about it in a [inaudible 00:23:16]. That's the most important thing. The way I think about it is mission is just like what are you trying to achieve in the world? And then the vision is what is the world look like once you've achieved it? What is the vision of the future? And the mission is what are you trying to do in this future? So that's the way I think about it. What are you trying to do? What does it look like? But I think keeping it as one thing is great. Like whatever works. There's no one way to do it. I also know that you're a big believer in the vision when you think about a vision and define a vision, making it very visual versus just like a doc. Can you talk about that? This framework originally started when I was at Tripadvisor and we had to develop a plan for what we wanted the strategy to be for trip planning. This was going to be a really big new feature for the company and for product. Trip planning is one of these intractable problems or been a number of startups that started as trip planning startups and nobody had really nailed it. Google at the time had a trip planning app that had some interesting elements to it, but it wasn't really clear that they were nailing it. And so we knew that there was both a really valuable problem to solve here, but also a really difficult problem. And we wanted to take an end-to-end approach to solving for this where rather than just kind of working bottoms up and getting to things experimentally where we might not actually ladder up to a clear product strategy, we had said we wanted to work top down, define what do we want to achieve, how we're going to achieve it, and what are the incremental steps we're going to use to get there. And one of the things that we said with stake that we put in the ground was the strategy doc wouldn't be complete without wireframes. This was the first time that we were doing that in the context of strategy. And the thing that we were really trying to solve for is the fact that oftentimes when you talk about strategy in words alone, everyone takes away a different interpretation of that strategy, whereas when you actually can show people wireframes of what the product will look like when that strategy is implemented, it creates much more alignment. And so the analogy I like to use, it's a little bit like working with an architect. You would never work with an architect that didn't provide you a blueprint of the house that they want to build for you because being able to describe a house in words alone is not enough. Everyone will come away from that with sort of a different interpretation of what is needed. But once you can see the blueprint, and the blueprint doesn't need to be high fidelity, it's a conceptual framework that shows you how things are laid out, it helps you understand how the pieces are going to come together. And most products are ultimately rendered in terms of visuals. They're pixels on a screen. And so it's important for you to understand how are those pixels going to be organized. I think an interesting litmus test question for this is, and a lot of mobile apps can only have four or five things on their nav bar. What are the four or five things? If you just describe your strategy in words, people might come up with one nav bar that's completely different than another nav bar. And as a result, you then find that the moment that you're implementing your mobile app, that there's completely different perceptions of what's valuable to the company and how the functionality should be organized.…

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