Lenny Rachitsky: commitment

Transcript context

…ess anyway to see as practice what you can negotiate and you can always say no later. Just because having that practice is going to make you hundreds of thousands, if not millions more in your career. Alternatively, if you feel bad about, "Oh, I wasted their time because I was too much for what they needed," make recommendations for them. So when the offer comes in [inaudible 00:39:01] it was senior PM role and what you realized is the JD and all of the work that you did is actually a director role, but they're not going to pay for a director role. How often does that happen? You get to say, "Look, this role isn't in alignment with where we're headed. Would you like me to make an introduction to somebody that's a better fit?" So you still get to help them, you remove yourself. And then sometimes they say, "No, actually we do want the role to be more senior. We're going to extend for you." My first VP role came out of turning down a content manager position for 70,000. And six months later, I landed at VP for a quarter million. That was my first realm into VP. The initial offer was for content manager. So they came three, four levels up the food chain. That was a long negotiation, but these things can happen if you don't say no too quickly. Along these lines, I want to touch on, it feels like maybe the core approach you take, kind of the core to your philosophy, which is to kind of break out of this idea of some benchmark for a specific role and instead make it very clear to the company, "Here's the pain I will solve for you that is really important to you, and here's why it's worth paying me this much more because it's such a big problem for you. " Talk about just that mindset. So this really comes down to having curiosity and showing curiosity about the actual problem because usually, if I'm speaking to a room of 400 people, which I'll occasionally do with some communities, I'll ask them who is actually doing the job that's on their job description? Nobody will raise their hand. It's not like you have your job description right there and that's what you do. There's always so much more that's not documented. Right? Now, when you're going into a position and you see a JD, you're like, "Yeah, I could do all those things," but there's so much more. This is another reason that anchoring to a number too early is tough because you anchor to, "Oh, this is fair for a senior PM role." This is fair. Then you go through the process of the interviewing, it's very clear that it's a director role. You're going to lead five people. They scoop another team under you. "Oh, we're going to put a product-led growth motion under you too. There's a whole engineering pod and there's this and there's this. " All of a sudden, that's called scope creep. So they scope creep the role, they talk about how they want a senior hire. They're excited about you, they get you excited about it. And then they give you the offer and it's actually 20% under the number you originally shared. And then you say, "Okay, well, this looks like a director role. I want X." And they say, "But you said you only wanted 140." Now they're using a number against you and it's very awkward to come back from that. So that's why we don't want to anchor too early, we want to understand. So this is one thing I wish, especially product engineers, designers, that side of the product stack, I would love for you to treat more of these like a sales conversation. You are an enterprise solution, a consulting solution that is several hundred thousand dollars, if not millions of dollars a year. If you were to sell that product into an organization, think enterprise B2B deals, and I know I'm getting a little buzzwordy here, think an enterprise B2B deal to Salesforce and you're going to sell a million and a half dollar product. It would take you 18 months to develop the relationships and close that deal. You have to develop champions in the organization. You have to understand what value you can create for each of those people so that they can advocate for you. You don't come in and pitch them the price right off the bat. You need to understand the value. So through the process, it's a discovery process. Why am I here? What gets you excited about me? That's how we start a conversation. Too many interviews start with, "Tell me about yourself, tell me about this stuff in the past." If you're talking about your past, you're on the back foot and you're losing that conversation. You're the one revealing information, you're not getting anything.…

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