Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…There's a lot in there. I can speak to the things that have resonated most deeply with me in my time there. The first is legitimate customer obsession. It's not marketing, it's legitimate, right? I've witnessed fierce and passionate debates internally that the root of what the people in the debate were really trying to unpack was what was the best thing for the customer. And so, really having that be central to our dogma and how we think about the business and why the company exists in the first place, really walking the walk there is something that I don't know that that's true everywhere. I mean, I've certainly worked at places where that hasn't been true, and there's a lot of factors that can lead to those trade-off decisions at times. Like is this the right thing for the business, the right thing for the customer? Being really challenging. I think just sort of having that customer centricity really baked into the DNA of the company makes those decisions, maybe not easier, but at least you can have more conviction around the why behind the decision at the end of the day. Another thing that I think makes HubSpot- Before you actually move on to the next one, I want to spend a little time on this one because I think people hear this and they're like, "Yes, okay, we're going to be customer obsessed. " And then, you have to make these hard decisions. Look at this experiment, it's going to grow our revenue 1%, but it's not really going to make the customer's life easier. How do you actually make this real? And there may be an example where you have to trade off growth versus we need to make sure the customer is getting what they need or making the customer happy to make it a little more real even. One, I think that's a really fantastic, maybe not counterpoint, but thing to call out. My point of view here is that oftentimes it's a function of what's the time horizon that the company uses as their sort of baseline for assessing decisions? And typically, when you're making decisions that could be described as hostile towards your customers, but a net positive for the business, you're probably not thinking long-term enough, right? Because there's no possible way, unless you have completely cornered a market and there is no competition whatsoever, that you could continually be hostile towards your customers and grow, right? At some point, that's going to catch up. And so, oftentimes I think it's the tension of what do we need to do in the short term to survive? Versus long-term, where are we going? What's the path that we're actually charting? Is I think the true tension. But if you're making decisions that might have lasting impact that are customer hostile, I think that's a really dangerous path to kind of go down. And so, having, I think, the discipline or the bravery or the courage, whatever, to I think focus on not necessarily tomorrow or the day after, and really think about two, three, four years from now, what are the outcomes we're trying to drive and what are the decisions we need to make in the interim that are going to lead to that outcome? If you stick to that sort of framework, or first principle is a better way to describe it, then I think you'll often end up arriving at the conclusion that doing the thing that's right for customers at the end of the day is the right decision.…

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