Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…No, I've never looked at that list, but I'll tell you, I have been so privileged to work with all these amazing humans. I can't take credit for it. They're just outstanding people. And I'm glad the diaspora is out there, because these people, rock stars. Okay. The main reason that I wanted to do a podcast episode with you is that you wrote this piece that was titled The User Research Reckoning is Here, which I understand caused quite a stir in the research community and I think adjacent communities. And let me just read one of your takeaways at the top of your post to give people a sense of what it was about. You wrote, "The user research discipline over the last 15 years is dying. The reckoning is here. The discipline can still survive and thrive, but we'd better adapt, and quick." Before we get into the meat of the piece, could you share a bit about just the reaction to this piece and maybe if it was a surprise and what you expected would happen when you put this out? Yeah, I was definitely surprised. I wrote it because I wanted to start a conversation about something I was thinking about. I didn't really know who would read it. And in the end it turned out a lot of people read it. I learned that using the word reckoning may have been a mistake because it inspires a lot of drama in a conversation that I wanted to be really productive and positive. Overall, I would say, though, that the response was very positive. It seemed to resonate with a lot of people who reached out to me. I spent a lot of time talking to teams, to designers, to researchers, but there were also a ton of critiques. I would say some of it was like people thought I was throwing research or researchers under the bus, like, "It's researchers' fault. We're doing it wrong." Which I don't believe at all. And that I wasn't taking responsibility as a research leader or a design leader myself. And the most interesting one I would say was the anti-capitalist crew, because one of my points that we'll talk about is that I think researchers need to be more profit focused. And there are a lot of people out there who, I think they think that's not cool or not research's job, and I'm like, "Well, what are we doing then, if we're not helping businesses succeed?" But that was the most surprising critique, for sure.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.