Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Well, this is maybe the most frustrating thing to me of all. And in fact, I should have answered when you asked me what motivated me to get spicy, what pushed me over the edge. Maybe I was in a bad mood that day, I don't know. But it was this article that made the rounds online by probably the biggest certification institution for product managers. And they had this big article saying, "This is what a product manager does." And it was a big graphic, and I'm looking at it and I was thinking, I cannot believe they said this out loud. This is 100% project manager, 100%. They didn't even pretend to put a little of the product, which most people of course are more creative than that. They bend over a little bit to make it look like a product manager, but not even close. And what I realized is what's so frustrating here is you have all these people that realize things aren't good yet most places they turn are just propagating that same model. So these certifications, which in my opinion are bogus, but most people don't know. And just imagine you're a brand new product manager. You look online probably what, 90% of the content out there is from the feature team world or worst. And so unless they get really lucky or they happen to be really lucky and have a manager that is guiding them in a good direction, it just propagates. And you see this all over, articles, books, conference speakers, and a lot of times I can't even bear to watch. And it's not like there aren't great people out there who can speak. It's just that proportionally they're in the minority. So it's not as easy as it should be. Like you're saying, why can't people just go and learn? They can if they're lucky enough to know where to go. Obviously I'm biased. You're biased too. We're biased on this, but people need to take more control of their career and really use their judgment, try to figure out what do you want to be if you want to be in the product world? What do you want to be? What kind of a product manager do you want to be? And if you want to stay, fine, but if you want to do this, then there are good resources for sure. There are good resources out there. And of course, I'm hoping more and more people do that. I think that's such a powerful insight you just shared, that most of the content you find online about product management is, I think you called it 90%, or it's just from companies that are not doing it the right way, feature teams is the way you described it. Can you talk a bit more about that? Why is that the case? Why don't we hear more from great companies? In fact, one of the most frustrating things for me is community. One of the things that's great about community... You have one of the biggest communities today, but there's a lot of these communities out there in the product world, product sub communities. And the one I love about them is pretty much everybody you meet genuinely wants to help. Really everybody. The problem is somebody posts a question, happens many times every day, and the majority of the well-meaning people jump in with what they learn at their crappy company. And I'm looking at that and the person is, oh, thank you very much, now I know what to do. And I'm going, "Oh no, there goes another one." It becomes self-propagating. And what are you going to do? Is somebody going to try to police these boards, thousands and thousands of them, like a Lenny endorsed person or a Marty endorsed person? I don't want to do that. You probably don't want to do that.…

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