Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…number went up five percent is that good is that not good is also an interpretation and is an is an art not a science it's just that sometimes i think we can give ourselves this feeling. And I get it. Like sometimes there's this instinct to want to control things and we want everything to be buttoned up. And we want to know that if we did ABC, everything will be great. Our career is going to be awesome. Our product's going to rocket ship. And I think designers are rightly often pushing back and saying, no, the reality is like this stuff is ambiguous and there's uncertainty and we can never know for sure. And I think all that is quite true. So the other thing I would say that I really support is like you just actually can't make a really great product by thinking you can A, B test your way into it. So that's, I fundamentally believe that, but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think there's actually, you know, these, it's not either, or it's not like data or design. It's like, these are just tools for us to use. And I would say every amazing designer that I've ever met is absolutely obsessed with trying to get a better understanding of reality. They want to know what users really think. They want to know what they're really doing. If they could read every user's minds, that's like the thing we would all want, right? As a designer is like, if I could just know what everyone is thinking and feeling every time they used it, my life would be a lot easier because then I would be able to build better and better things. And so that's what it's trying to help us do. It isn't perfect. No metric is going to tell you whatever we hope that it can in terms of the true certainty and precision. But it doesn't mean we can't use it to better our product development. I was going to say exactly what you just said, which is every great designer that I've worked with was obsessed with data and the most leaning into the data versus designers that are just like, nah, I think I'm going to have a sense of what's right. And why would we let that tell us what to do? And to your point, it's not going to tell you what to do. It'll tell you where opportunities arise. Let me take us back to the management chat and maybe just let me ask something broad. What do you feel is the biggest change in the role and day-to-day work and life of a manager these days with the rise of AI? I think that... managing change. It's always been manager's job to manage change. And there's always the chaos of what's going on. I just think the rate of change is accelerating. And we've seen that over the last couple of decades. And so I find that there's just a great deal more uncertainty that people have about things like we all, you know, where is AI going to be in two years from now? I don't know. Who really knows, right? And so, you know, are we going to have AGI in five years? That kind of changes a lot about the landscape. Not to mention, I think there's quite a lot of fear that many organizations are feeling. You know, it's like if my career has always been in design and now these tools are getting better and better at what I'm doing, then holy shit what happens to my career and my future and do i need to pivot do i need to learn different things and so it's this change it's this feeling of uncertainty and i think a lot of times managers have to deal with that in addition to what you were saying before which is they also have to learn these new skills which is managing AI and managing these more powerful tools in their arsenal of trying to get things done. So that is very different, I think, than maybe 10, 20, 30 years ago. And so I think that the skills that become more important are obviously communication, feedback, compassion, but just being able to work with humans and to have them understand that like, yes, we are in a state of change. I think every leader has to do this now. Every startup founder that I know, every CEO is how do you land this message that things are changing and we need to be very like we need to be very open to change if we go and stick to our old ways we're probably going to get left behind uh our product's going to get left behind even our way of doing things is going to be left behind so we need to change right we need to change our product and we need to change the way that we work as we all talked about in terms of smaller teams more nimble blah blah blah um but at the same time it's like how do we do that in a way that doesn't just freak everyone out? It's like, ah, it's chaos, everything's changing. So I think about this metaphor a lot of like the willow tree, which is like the willow tree is a very sturdy tree. It can survive a lot of storms, disasters, et cetera. But it's also very flexible. Like the branches are very, very flexible. And that's in some ways what allows it to be very sturdy. So I think today management is really about this idea of like, be sturdy while being flexible. And that is a very hard thing to pull off. But I think that's like, at least when I even go into be like, be like the willow tree, Julie. Just imagine the willow tree and like try and channel that as the kind of feeling of what it is that we're trying to do together.…

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