Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think the largest impact that happens here is on alignment, so how CXOs are thinking if that is not very clear, and that can be a document, and so on, and so forth. But for a lot of people, it's not very clear on... I can see one part of the funnel. I can understand... The marketing team can understand the best why we are acquiring those users, but they don't fully see the picture of, "If I attract this kind of users, why will these users become loyal, and what does that entire thing look like or, say, some other team which is building a part of the product? Where do I come in and so on?" So I think the largest impact that the show don't tell has is on, basically, getting the entire company together on the same page and them being able to understand why I'm doing, and which part of the entire picture I am working on, and why others are working on so that I can actually work with them to solve that part. That's one. The other thing that it helps, Lenny, is it also helps in choosing directions, like I said, because we are not doing one, but three of them. I'm choosing one alternative versus the other, and sometimes these strategic discussions, they can get going all sorts of different ways, and maybe you will talk about one particular unique point and go deeper rather than look at the entire picture together and say, "This is good because of all of these five points that we presented in page one versus the other one." I think the other benefit, just one of the benefits of working backwards in Amazon's whole written-down memo approach is it forces you to crystallize ideas and not stay superficial because there's so many good ideas in theory. But then, when you have to get really concrete, that's actually a terrible idea. Basically, it's the same benefit in a lot of ways of get very concrete. What are you actually going to do? That will help you identify, "Okay. This isn't going to work. What are we even thinking?" So I like that. Awesome. Okay. Another framework that you have is something that you call the four BB framework for product strategy. Can you talk about what that's all about? We essentially saw that if a startup actually usually wants to do a bunch of things across the border, there's always like, "Hey, I should be investing in tech debt or building core platforms. That would really help my product in the long term. That's super important," and that's my engineering managers and largely, people asking for that bandwidth. Then, there is the product manager themselves who's basically saying, "I want to do feature enhancement, bug fixes, my version twos, a few areas, experiments, and so on, and so forth." That's a regular product backlog that would work on screen by screen, and there's this leadership which will say, "You know what? Now, we have a suite of products. Now, I want to take a large delta bit that may work. It may not work, but we need to make sure that it works, but I need work across teams, and it's not only one person that needs to do it. I need contribution from four or five of you that come together and deliver that," or there are places where a company is just reimagining their identity, or they're pivoting which is like, "All right. We were doing X. Now, we are doing X plus Y. That's how we want to be known," or, "We were doing X. Now, we want to do very little of X because current consumers, okay, we will take care of them, but now we want to pivot into Y." So it usually is in four of these buckets, and what really happens is it gets down to product managers eventually prioritizing between these four. So I don't think it's a tactical prioritization product manager call. It really is a product strategy call, and the conversation that needs to happen is between, say, the head of product and the CEO or even the leadership. If I gave you a hundred focus points, how much will you put in each of these buckets, and what are those four buckets? Those are the four BB buckets, so what are the ones? We call them... First BB is Brilliant Basics. The reason why we call it BB, Brilliant Basic, you need to brand... You cannot brand it as tech debt, so it feels like very off because these are brilliant, these are important. That's what the company's built on, and the company needs to invest in that. So that's one. The second one is Bread and Butter. So that's your backlogs. If the product managers had no big ideas, and they just were left on their own, what would they come up with in terms of just improving that line of business that they're given? Then, there are Big Bets. Now, that's where your larger ideas that have come together, but how many big bets should we take, or is this big bet even a big one? That's where you're working backwards or PR FAQs start becoming even more important because those are the kind of bets that cannot be taken without everybody basically signing up, working backwards, and saying, "We will all make this successful." Breaking Bad essentially is a different world altogether. That's where you want to redefine your company.…

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