Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Well, it's an interesting question because I think different people have different styles on how they want to handle this. I'd say the way my brain works in these situations which I think is a little bit atypical, is I'm actually a little bit better if I am free forming a lot of elements and just speaking from confidence in areas I know versus specifically trying to lay out every exact bullet point I want to hit. I'm going to show up as more comfortable, I'm going to show up as more dynamic, and I'm going to be able to engage in a more thoughtful conversation, so for me, my approach to these sorts of things is I write a lot. I write a lot of notes. I write a lot of documents. And then in general, for any of these types of communications, I am just pulling from things I know deeply because I've written them down, I've thought a lot about them. For a lot of other people they really just need to spend a lot of time on prep to make sure they nail the communication they want to nail. And I found it requires a different amount of investment for different people on my team, so the point is not as much how much time you spend, it's how well do you really know the material, and how well do you really know what your audience is going to care about with that material so that you are prepared for every question you might get. I'll give an example from my Pinterest days, the primary way with which you interfaced on any key strategic topic was product review, right? You'd go in and you talk to Ben, our CEO and Jack our head of product. And Ben and Jack had very different styles of communication. Jack in particular would very early on ask a few different data questions to get context on the problem. And if you, as a product leader or an individual PM or an individual designer didn't know the answers to any of those, it cast doubt on the entire rest of that meeting. Because, the team wouldn't be confident that you had all the right context to understand the problem, so a lot of what I would coach my team on is, okay, I'm pretty confident Jack's going to ask this question, then this question, then this question. Based on the material I'm seeing from you, how well are you prepared to answer those questions? Different execs might be somewhat different in that regard, but if you haven't thought through all the questions that might be asked from the document that you're sharing or the presentation you're about to present, you're not prepared enough, right. You need to know the entire universe of how that meeting can go. And that may take you dozens of hours, it might take you three hours, but the most important thing is that you've asked what possible questions can be asked and am I prepared to answer all of those? Do I have all the data in front of me to answer all of those? But because if I don't the chances of the meeting you're having a negative outcome just increased dramatically. I imagine some people are listening to this and they're like, holy shit, I need to spend this much time on preparing for meetings like this, but in my experience, that's exactly what you do need to do to be successful. And so this is real good, real talk about how long it takes to prepare for important meetings like the ones you're talking about. Absolutely. I mean, for better or worse, the way that a lot of key decisions are made inside companies are through these types of forums and meetings. And it's an extremely high leverage piece of time for a product manager or a product designer in terms of how much impact they can have. And if you are under preparing for those sorts of things, the chances of you being able to have the type of impact you want, to have the type of career growth you want just go down dramatically. And I'm sure, you and I have definitely made mistakes in our career in important meetings in the past, but I think one of the things that I really try to do is learn from each one of those and make sure those types of issues wouldn't happen again. And now I feel like I have a pulse on, I know if I haven't done the work going into a meeting, that's going to make it have a more negative result. And now I'm pretty accurate. And look sometimes you just didn't have enough time and it is what it is. But now I know, okay, I know I'm not quite prepared for this and it can go poorly as a result. And I know also when I've done the right prep and I'm ready for anything, whether it's a board meeting, or a meeting with the executive team, or a meeting with an external partner, right? And I think that's what you're trying to build as any sort of product leader, or PM, or product designer, or researcher, is that intuition of like I'm ready for this, I know everything that's going to come at me, I'm prepared for any eventual outcome. And if you're not, then probably the answer is spend more time to get ready.…

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