Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Thanks, Lenny. Great to be here. It's great to have you here. So I had this colleague at Airbnb, her name was Jana, and she always had this joke that she shared that if it's been six months and she hasn't switched teams or hasn't moved desks, she knew there was this reorg coming, there's something happening, something was coming to change everything. And you wrote a whole book about this general idea of teams changing, reorgs, you call reteaming. I have the book right here. It's called Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams. I feel like just people underestimate the opportunities and benefits of change, and I think that we see it as a scary thing. So I'm really excited to spend time with you and chat about this topic. Before we get into the meat of it, I'm just curious why you decided to spend so much of your time researching this area of team change, reorgs, reteaming. Yeah, that's a good question. It wasn't necessarily planned. I had been working in a variety of different fast-growing startups for most of my career in 20 years in software-as-a-service companies in particular. And I read a lot of books to try to get better at my work and what we're doing in our teams. I have a lot right over there as you can see, and a lot of the books I would read on teams and the advice that I would get from people would be, you really want to keep your teams the same. You want to go for that forming, storming, norming, performing kind of thing. And I had thought about that and I was like, wait, well it wasn't really possible for us when I was at a startup and I was the 10th employee and we grew to 900 people and now thousands of people, our team's kind of morphed and changed. So I feel like if you're in a fast-growing company or a shrinking company, look there, don't look at trying to fight the natural evolution. I was just trying to prove a point and to illustrate that teams change. And I was also curious to see, well, was that just my experience and the experience of my colleagues in Southern California? What is it like for other people? So I was just curious.…

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