Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…To start, it's a mindset. And I call this the light culture. I mean, of course, it's really important to talk about it so that we understand what it is. But it has to be part of the culture of the organization. I mean, that's how I see it. So, for example, at Google, I've seen that for during a long time, we had a like a product pillar called delight. And the fact that it was a permanent place in the strategy, and we see it all the time, that's actually a kind of reminder that we need to build features and create opportunities that map and align with that pillars. I mean, just the fact as a director, having this as a pillar is a first step. And the second thing is to make it part of the routine. I mean, the routine of your and the rituals of your company. So here an example, when I worked at Spotify, we used to have something called a squad health check. Maybe you heard about that at some point. I mean, something about checking how good is the team is functioning. And it was happening every quarter. And actually the leaders used to be extremely religious about making sure that the team is actually doing it. And the fact that they show that they care made it happen every quarter. So the leaders actually, if they are bought in, as you said, and they are convinced, they have a big role to play into putting that in place by giving it a chance. And again, when I worked at Spotify, we had something amazing called Hack Days. I mean, I've seen it as a company, but it's never as good as at Spotify. So we used to have Hack Days every month, and we used to have Hack Week toward the end of the year. And again, the fact that this is happening on a regular basis makes the thinking and the mindset completely adopted, like the mindset of innovation and going completely out of box, et cetera. So now I'm advocating for the light days and they actually help organizations setting up the light days. And I recently did this. with a company called Migros. It's actually the largest supermarket chain in Switzerland. And we had hack days, or like delight days in that case, where we actually, of course, spoke about delight. And then we allowed all the teams... to go crazy and innovate and think about delightful features. It was very playful. The team loves it. And we ended the day by giving them the chance to demo and we select the best or the winning delight feature that the company will end up implementing. So it's about putting it as a routine in a continuous way so that it become like part of the culture and not just a topic that is brought in once in a while. That sounds so fun, a delight day. And again, when people hear this word, it could sound like the confetti example, but you keep coming back to this point. Delight is not just that surface level low type of delight. There's deep delight that solves anticipated needs, exceed expectations, or removes friction. So deep delight is still a type of delight, but it's actually one that also happens to solve a functional need. Okay. It's interesting. So as you talk, I've been thinking about like, what are the fastest growing companies in the world, the top product teams? And it's interesting how... delight. They're so delightful. And I don't think it's a coincidence. I think about cursor, maybe the fastest, maybe the second fastest growing company behind ChatGPT. Like speaking of exceeding expectations, you just like click tab and it codes for you. Anticipating needs. That's like the ultimate example of anticipating your need. It's writing your code for you. Okay. Delight. Amazing. Lovable. Like it's called lovable. It's Amazing example. ChatGPT, if you can imagine, exceeding expectations of blowing your mind. Incredible example of delight. I think about Linear as we're talking, just like they are winning in a very crowded space because they invested in making it much more delightful. I think about Suno, if you know the Music AI app, where it just like creates magical music for you, just telling it what you want to hear. So there's so much here of just like, yes, there's a lot of power to making, especially in a crowded market and AI, especially just make it's almost like cable stakes now. It needs to blow your mind for anyone to pay attention. We just need to be careful because the surprise has an effect that vanished over time. So there's this thing that is called habituation effect. How can you make sure that you're not just surprising your user once when they use it the first time, and then they become like no one use case. So you mentioned a couple of examples. Of course, I do agree. They are all delightful, but one of the elements that is part of the delight checklist is are you, or do you at least have a plan to maintain that delight or that surprise over time? Like for example, when we introduced background replacing Google Meet, we first introduced like a blur, then we added static image, then we allowed for video background, then we added like a immersive background where it's like a moving slowly as if it's very real. And now they even have like AI generated background. So it's about creating that surprise over time in a complete continuous way to avoid that happy creation effect.…

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