Anneka Gupta: belief

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next-generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments, easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time and accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/Lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/Lenny. I want to come back to something Rachel also shared with me when asked her what questions to ask you. By the way, first of all, she spent a lot of time raving about how amazing you are first. That was the first set of conversations, and then she came up with a bunch of questions to ask you. And so her other question was about how good you are at navigating very difficult personalities. She showed this quote that she constantly saw you interact with and bring together several leaders who had much higher egos and very disparate points of view who are not informed or thoughtful or as gracious as you were, and she also said you have very low ego. She wanted me just to ask you for what you've learned about how to navigate very difficult personalities and help people align when it's not neatly what they want to do. I try to embody the mindset of feeling like and believing that I can work with anyone. I think what I do when I hit a difficult personality and difficult personalities come in all shapes and sizes and forms is I really try to understand what drives that person. What is it that they really care about? Hopefully they care about something deeply about the company and making the company successful. Sometimes they care about their own personal career, how they're showing up, what people view of them. That's fine. I just need to understand what it is that they really care about, and then if I need something from them, what is it that I can do to motivate them to find what I need from them important? And trying to make that match of they have this desire kind of like building a product, they have this desire and how am I going to get them to care about the thing that I want to care about? The other thing I do is instead of feeling like anger or frustration with the person and instead trying to shift that to a mindset of feeling gratitude and a positive emotion about them is I look at them and I ask myself what can I learn? Maybe I don't want to adopt their personality or operate the way that they are operating, but everyone has something that they can teach you, whether it's their communication style or the way they're able to marshal people together, the way they come up with visionary ideas, whatever it may be, trying to study that person and be curious about them, learn from them and then thank them for that and feel the generosity genuinely about what I got from this situation. It's easier to do sometimes than others, but I think it comes back to that abundant mindset. If you can approach it with an abundant mindset, then you can really consciously do this and when you actually learn something, you will feel the gratitude when you recognize that you are able to get something from that. I love that this connects with your other original piece of advice of just turning something into this is going to be fun. Let's make this fun. And in this case it's like make it great. What can I learn from this person even though they're really annoying me and it's frustrating and don't want anything done? Then your other point of understanding what they want and kind of using that as a way to pull them in your direction, how do you figure out what they want? Do you have any tricks for just like, "Here's how I learn what this person's motivations are and goals are"?…

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