Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, there's a great phrase I heard a mentor once say, which is culture of a process. Process is important. And sometimes you need to process to scaffold until you build the culture. But I think it's like you got to view the team as this asset you're building. This culture is an asset that you're building and you're investing in it and you're cultivating it and you want to build something that's stronger than... That's a great example, a CX person or just directly messaging an engineer or just asking for something. You want to build something that's resilient to that. That's the real product that you're building as a PM I think is the team that builds the product, and is resilient to all these things. It doesn't happen overnight. It's not going to happen in the first quarter that the team has formed. But it happens over time gradually with little messages and little interactions and positive feedback and asking people to work a little bit differently and giving them a reason why and building trust. And I think that success in my job is to build a very self-reliant team that's very resilient to all those things that I would otherwise, like you said, to keep me up at night really make me worried. You shared an example of how you do that. These little, I call these micro interactions. So much of a PM is these micro interactions with team members, which is so much harder now in a remote world where you can't just walk by and just do a little chat. The chat you shared I think is an awesome example where the language was a really powerful shift in how this person thought. Is there anything else along those lines you could share of how to create this sort of culture? One thing that I try to do is when somebody takes something that would be my job and does that, whether it's on the design side, they lean in more or on the engineering side, they lean in more people bring ideas or they say, "Hey, I took the liberty of doing this." It could be as small as something bureaucratic or as big as an idea or a suggestion. I just shower them with positivity. I just show them just how excited I am that they did that. I just want that to happen again and them to feel even more bold. And just like when somebody takes something off your plate, when somebody does kind of the PM, what you think is like, that's PM thinking, what are you doing? Right? Just really want them to feel that that is extremely welcome.…

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