Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…That's great, that's exactly [inaudible 00:37:33]. I experienced it, it felt great. Let me go in a slightly different direction. One of my favorite posts of yours is called execution beats strategy every time, and I think another way you phrase it is, execution eats strategy for breakfast. I think you put that somewhere. I'd love to hear about this because I completely agree. I think a lot of people obsess with strategy and vision and got to get this right and forget that most of the work is execution. So yeah, I'd love to hear just your take and insight here. Yeah, I don't know if I coined execution eats strategy for breakfast, I think a lot of things eat other things for breakfast, but I'm a believer. I do think execution eats strategy for breakfast and that's something we used to say a lot at Meta. It was just the most important part and I was well-trained in that. That was one of the key lessons that I learned there, and it's because when you have... Look, strategy is super fun. You get to think about all this pie in the sky stuff. You get to think about if the world operated in rational patterns and you could predict the future, what is going to be the second and third order effect? You get to use your brain in a really fun, philosophical way, but customers don't care. Customers don't care about your fancy strategies and your five-year plan. They care about the product that's in their hands. And so anything that distracts you from thinking about the product in your hands I think, or maybe worse, takes you away from solving customer's problems today, I think is a distraction. And I think one of the things that you learn is if you have great strategy, perfect strategy but poor execution, you don't win because your strategy never makes it to the market. And what's even worse is that you have learned nothing. You don't know whether it was your strategy that was wrong or whether it was your execution that was wrong, all you know is you didn't win. Whereas when you have a pretty good strategy, a good enough strategy, you're in the right direction and you have perfect execution, you still don't win immediately, but you know your execution was great. So then you learn, what do you need to do to improve your strategy? You've got the execution machine, you go back, you update your strategy, you relaunch, and you keep on doing it until your strategy is perfect and then you do win. And that's the lesson I repeatedly learned.…

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