Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, for me it really comes down to the engagement we can get externally because our issue tracker is public, our customers comment on it, we get community contributors committing to our code base and helping get that to be a better product. I can see where in certain industries we'll say financial services, maybe you can't do that as much, but I would say that there's still a balance where there's probably something you'd be more transparent about. I'm even seeing in heavily regulated industries where they're starting to publish more of the roadmap externally as a way to build more trust with their users and their customers because now they know where you're going and it's not a cloak and dagger type feeling. And so I will admit it can't be done everywhere, but I think it can be done a lot more than it's done today and you get a community feedback loop, which is great, especially when being in a product division. So one takeaway here is it feels like most of the benefit is in products that are building with a community component and developer oriented and open source. Feels like those are the Venn diagrams of where this is most impactful versus Slack doing this or I don't know, Salesforce. Yeah, I would say that if you're in tech and you're building a product regardless if you're a developer platform or a DevSecOps platform like us, I think there is benefit. I think Salesforce could have a little bit more engagement from a broader customer base. My last employer, we started sharing the list of open requests for new features more externally and we got a much more honed in roadmap and that led to better customer engagement, which led to a higher retention rate, which led to better expansion numbers. So I think it's about what's right for your business and not necessarily are you in column A or column B.…

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