Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I think it stems from the cutting down cycle time, which is the time it takes to make decisions. I realized that a lot of the time is not... I mean, all the time that you spend documenting the requirements or designing the product or actually writing code is time really, really well spent. All the time that is spent in between those activities to align, to discuss a decision, to not make up your mind, then have a meeting the next week, "Oh, let's regroup two weeks from now." That happens in our companies a lot. The question is, how do you cut that down? And for that what we do is we have product reviews and as much as possible we try to come out with decisions in those product reviews. And you have to operate in a one-way door versus two-way door concept. If something is a two-way door, you have to be able to make the call quickly and you want to make a good call, but if you get it wrong, it's okay, we can turn it back. If it is a one-way door, if it's a massive launch, sure, it's okay for it to take some deliberation. Maybe it even goes through the C-suite and we have a discussion, but my guidance to my team is cut down the decision-making that has to happen or to cut down the time required for the decision-making between those various steps. A few things I heard that you do that you didn't mention that I think helped with this, one is that there was a period where you ran daily stand-ups with cross-functional teams during COVID just to keep things moving. There's another story I heard where you wrote a 15-page PRD over the weekend to unblock a stall team. It feels like these are ... look for opportunities to unblock essentially. Well, I want that to be an exception rather than the rule, but yes, I want to be able to step in or I want all our leaders to be able to step in when needed. I think you have to be hands-on. You have to be hands-on when needed. Those two examples, we were coming out of COVID, we had a massive shortage of drivers on our platform and we were talking about growth earlier and we had clear goals on how we grow the number of drivers on our platform all the way from getting new drivers in and improving the funnel as well as regaining existing drivers. And Lenny, there was no shortage of the number of ideas, but again, there was a problem with cycle time. So I said, "Great, our cycle time is going to be 24 hours." And so I think there was a period of about six months when we did do daily stand-ups and they were extremely helpful to unblock the teams on making certain decisions and we shipped a lot. And I think it took us about nine to 12 months, but we were able to come out the other side having a great number of drivers. And the great thing is that what we did in our driver and courier funnel at that time is still paying off because the number of drivers and couriers continues to grow and now we are worldwide at about an eight million number. And we were probably close to half of that when we were just out of COVID. So that's an example of where daily standards help, I try to minimize that. The PRD exam, yes, I did write a PRD. It was a 15-page PRD. We were working on a pretty big concept and it was a risky concept. And it was driver facing and that's always high stakes. And by this time, we have had about 20 conversations and brainstorm meetings and documents that had been written with the best intentions, but thing that was not becoming clear is, hey, what should we actually ship? Because there were a lot of good ideas and not so good ideas, but no one was actually putting it all together to say, "This is what we're going to ship." So it was one Sunday night and I literally, it took me two hours and I just wrote down, I'm like, "Guys, this is my stake in the ground. We can completely change it, but this is the product we will ship. Agree or disagree." Now, the product that we eventually shipped was at least 50% different than what I had written down, but it just catalyzed us getting to that endpoint. Now, if I were to do that every single day or every single week, then I would say there's a problem.…

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