Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I know. Okay, and then the other tip was sketch the solution. Just do a post-it, draw it out, see how it feels. I think just people don't realize just the power of, "Oh, I have to actually think about what this will look like and not just paint this very fuzzy picture of what it might be. " Amazing. I feel like this is the most tactical and practical segment of advice on how to get better at vision. I'm so excited to get this out and for folks to have things that they actually do to get better at vision. I feel like this could be the whole podcast but you have more awesome stuff to share so I want to keep going. We're going to keep you here, extract as much content as we can out of your brain. So you touched on this phrase that you like to use for describing what is the craft of product management, succinctly describing the craft of product management. And I know there's many layers deep in this concept but just to start, what is this phrase and framework you think of to describe what is product management craft? What is the job of PM, basically? So I use, I want to say clarity and conviction. And that's what product management is. You bring clarity and you have conviction. So you find a lot of time, we've just talked about a number of things. All of those things, what they're doing is bringing clarity. And that clarity especially for the problem. So even when, I'll just give you a little tactical thing. I noticed there's some PMs who will send an email and I read the email, I'm like, "What do you want me to do? Is this an FYI? Are you saying there's a problem? Do you want me to help?" So just even something as simple as that. Because as PMs, we're constantly influencing by bringing clarity. So the clarity, all the stuff we just talked about, coming up with a list of problems, really trying to understand what customers care about. All you're doing is bringing clarity so that when you're in a room and someone is going off and doing [inaudible 00:58:07] actually we don't need that research. I feel like we all know that that's a problem. We don't need that research. Instead of doing foundational research, let's do UX validation when the time comes. That's the kind of clarity you can break that saves cycles. So that's the clarity piece. And if you think when you think about what clarity is, you define clarity. It's this transparency. It's the simplicity of understanding. That's what the word is. It's removing all, it's sifting out all the stuff that's polluting the core thing. That's how I think of clarity. And the tactical thing that I use to bring that clarity is the framework I talked about which is the narrative, insights, strategy, big rocks. It brings clarity to why we're doing what we're doing, how we're going to do it and what we're going to do. And I spend time talking and I can spend time talking about all this but we talked about the workshop to do that and I actually have, and one of my old EMs who you've actually had on the podcast talks about this a lot. People have fancy decks. That's great. Clarity comes when you write. So I made them write two-page documents. I'll let you go up to four, maybe. But two page documents with insights, your strategy or I use the word approach sometimes and then the big rocks. And the big rocks are not a laundry list of 20 things because if I asked you to make me a cocktail, you would put ice in first. Then you would pour the drink. You would not put the drink and then put the ice or it will splash and it's messy and that's how an endless roadmap looks to me. So it's like 3, 4, 5 things that anyone can remember that are the biggest things that if we land, this gets us closer to solving the problems. Then every other little thing is around. You can fill that around. That's the sand around the big rocks.…

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