Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think you're touching on actually when I interviewed in 2019, I actually asked Sid, our co-founder and CEO, a similar question. And I came from security in the GitLab and I said, hey, we don't share more than four or six weeks with a roadmap with customers and even sales because we were in the situation where we didn't want our great idea to be taken and built before we built it. And that had happened to me at other places I've worked. And so in that conversation with him, he basically said, "It's product's job to be ambitious instead engineering's job to meet that ambition." And if you think of it that way, and it's that collaboration between the two, it becomes less scary to put the information out. But you are right. We're very even transparent there. The thing that gets into what you mentioned, the ability to ship software, I'm floored by these numbers, but these are real numbers for us. We still ship 12 releases a year. It used to be on the 22nd of every month, it's now the third Thursday, so we don't have to have people work over a weekend, but we've done that for over a decade. And our last release put us at 149 releases that have come out essentially every month for the last little over 12 years. Someone listening to this may be like, okay, wow, we should try this sort of thing. Let's try to be transparent with everything, meetings everywhere, public handbook. Imagine this doesn't work for most companies. So a question just on my mind is, what do you think it takes for a company to work this way? What are some elements that need to be true for them to succeed being this transparent? Yeah, I think it is pushing yourself to realize what is actually confidential and what actually is not confidential. At other places I've worked, they end up with these artificial silos even if you're all in the same office. And that ends up impacting your ability to truly collaborate and get the results you're looking for. And I can give you a great example that sometimes you have a program manager or program management team who's tracking the schedule and now they're being forced to be the router between teams, as opposed to say it's all stored in a single source of truth. Anyone can comment on it, anyone can contribute to it. And that starts all the way from team meetings, whether it's my leadership team or it goes all the way down to coffee chats that we have where sometimes people will just record that chat because all of a sudden there's something really interesting in that. And for those listening or watching us, as you said, looking at the beard that I have instead of just listening to the podcast-…

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