Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…tion process. It's the failing a lot. We actually tested five or six versions of the ads product before we got it to take off and it took months, and then we were on the verge of death multiple times. In fact, I actually went back to run the payments team while I was working on that product because the team we had gathered still want to continue working on it, but I needed a second job back on the payments team because they asked me, "We don't think this thing is going to work. You should go run your old team again." And I thought, "Well, I will do both." And so I did both for a while until it really took off. The thing that I think a lot of large companies don't realize is that you can love something to death. And so with every new product, I'd rather do it out of the limelight, do it with the minimal resources and have the freedom to fail because success and failure really is... In startups, failing fast is really important or succeeding fast. It's the long slog that makes it really hard. In a company, you end up getting cut if you're the long slog product. And so being able to just say, "You know what? We're pruning this. We're doing the next thing, the next thing." And then having the time to iterate and grow is really critical. So as a leader trying to do this and create space for this, is there something you've learned about how to allow for, "Don't over scrutinize us, don't look at us too carefully. We don't want to be in the limelight. Don't put too many resources on this yet. " Is it just like, "Hey, Mark. Here's what I think." I imagine it's not as easy as that. There's a lot of influence and that kind of work. Is there any tactics that you could share to create this sort of environment? I think the most important part of the environment is really patience. And again, this is a portfolio strategy and I tell every PM who... I used to do a new hire PM class and I say, "Look, a lot of you are going to go into the core product and your job is to grow X by 3 to 5% every six months. Growing engagement or growing sessions or maybe growing video views or whatever your metric is, you're trying to grow something 5% and then you exceed expectations." And I said, "And then a bunch of you are like, 'I want to do something new. I want to build something from scratch.'" And I said, "By the way, a very, very successful company for a new set of products has a 50% hit rate. So half of you are going to come back in a year and have a different job because that did not work out. Do you have the resilience to do that?" And I think somebody, you enter a large company... By the way, you can have an amazing career building core products because that is an incredible journey within... Because you learn so much about the mechanics of what that takes. And yet at the same time, I found a lot of energy from doing something that someone hasn't done before. And so I really enjoyed the, "Hey, this thing could fail. Let's pivot. Let's try to figure out. Let's prune this. Let's try that." And not everything I did there succeeded, but a lot of the things that are the lasting products are once that gotten really big. And so for me it was a greater reward and it made a journey so much more interesting. But for others, I think work on the core product, learn the skills. It is absolutely respectable as well. But if you choose to be the person who works on innovation new products, expect in a year, you might literally have nothing to show for it, but the lessons that you learned. And I think those lessons are really precious and we often underestimate that too.…

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