Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…It goes back to little alpha types or type A folks who are just so attached to not getting it wrong. When you need to move forward and it's not about being right or wrong, it's really about not being confused and making sure everybody's pulling in the same direction. That is actually really liberating. And when you know that the whole idea is to have a Socratic conversation about what you're trying to do, then coming to the table with some kind of half-baked ideas or actually not an opinion, I think actually brings into a conversation of feedback. But you have to manifest it through, if you just play this through but then you potentially playing the right or wrong game, that's really poor. I also think it's the best way to learn. If you don't know exactly what you're doing, how can you learn back from why you made that decision? So if you had a clear understanding, ultimately it's a growing organization. This is not a one-off project. We're going to build many projects in the future. So if you're not sure about what we're trying to accomplish, how can you know what you learned from it? I love that. So the idea here is make it very okay to be wrong, but make it not okay to be confused and not clear about here's what we're doing, here's why we're doing it. Everyone's aligned exactly on the same idea. How can I have a product conversation if I'm not sure what you stand for? It's really hard to have a Socratic conversation, really hard to have. If you ask folks how many time you left a meeting in corporate, it could be a startup or larger companies and you are not sure exactly what was the problem discussed or what are next steps. More often than not, they'll raise their hand. That for me is a waste of building time. So actually that agitates me in another great way, but when I come in and I'm proven wrong or there's a strong challenge or argument, again that's a little bit my love language, I actually enjoy those. I think we leave the conversation much better.…

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