Shreyas Doshi: evaluation

Transcript context

…What I'm hearing is people focus maybe too much on the output, like the experience, these experience design taste versus what they choose to take in as informing their taste, and what they see as an example of great and correct. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. And look, taste is about the ability to identify what is really good, without needing to see its results, because, look, it requires zero taste right now for anybody to say, "Oh, that CEO of NVIDIA is a genius, right? Jensen is a genius." If you are saying that in 2024, it actually requires zero taste, because you can just look up NVIDIA stock price. It requires zero skill. But to be able to say that in 2010, you have to realize Jensen Huang didn't change much between 2010 and 2024. So Lenny, even in sports, there's this saying, "Game recognize game," and that's about taste. But what we need to understand is it's game recognize game before the game is called, right? Like, game recognize game in the practice session. Because it takes no genius right now to say, "Well, Patrick Mahomes is great quarterback," or, "Virat Kohli is a great cricketer," or whatever else. It requires no genius to do that. It requires zero taste. So I also believe some of us, especially as we get more senior, and we get more successful, and we just get a lot more scope, and responsibility, and a lot of accolades, we become these tough graders. Like, "I don't like anything," right? Like, "Ah, this is crap, this is crap, this is crap." Again, that requires zero taste. Anybody can say that. Anybody can just say, "Everything is horrible." So I do think there is something about being able to understand that, and I think I'll share some examples. This two-way door thing, so let me just share a few observations, if I might. So the first one is we get overly excited about cool metaphors, okay? Like, one-way door, two-way doors. There's some guy, I don't know who it is, I just read somewhere, there's some guy who had written a blog post about this idea, but he called it reversible and irreversible decisions, and it was the same idea. And I think somebody was lamenting that that did not catch on, reversible and irreversible decisions. But what caught on is two-way door and one-way door. What's the difference? The only difference is you got attracted to the catchy metaphor, and the other one is the authority bias, because Bezos said it. Take another example, we get very impressed with alliterations. I'm serious, we get very impressed with alliterations. Okay, so how many of us love fail fast? Fail fast, okay, nobody's going to raise hands now. Okay, fine. Maybe you truly don't love fail fast. How about fast follow? How many of you love fast follow? Let's consider that, like fail fast, "We're going to fail fast." What if that thing were called fail quickly? It's the same meaning. Do you think you would be as attracted to that idea if it were called fail quickly? No.…

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