Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…A lot of your viewers are wondering where's the R because there's another variant of this culture. RICE, where there's rich as well. I prefer ICE because I prefer to fold the rich into the I for various reasons but both are valid, both are equivalent in a sense. I'm in your boat, that's exactly how I think about it. I think people over complicate this stuff and try to get so many math formulas involved with estimating impact, and I feel like these are just simple heuristics to kind of bubble the best ideas to the top. It doesn't have to be a perfect estimate of impact and confidence and all those things, so I think the simpler is better and it always ends up being a spreadsheet. People always have these tools to estimate these things but it's like a spreadsheet, Google Sheets. Great. So yeah, you're actually leading me to my next point. So when you come to estimate impact you will realize it's the hardest part. So sometimes it's just a gut feeling and it's a guess and sometimes it's based on some spreadsheet or some analysis and the back of envelope calculation you've done and I think that's legitimate. Sometimes these things do show you some things you didn't think of and sometimes the best case it's based on tests. You actually tested it, you interviewed 12 customers, you show them the thing and out of those only one actually liked it. You should reduce your impact based on that usually, or you do other types of tests. We'll talk about testing in a second. What happens is that people tend to just go with gut instinct and then give themselves a high confidence. They say it's an eight and I'm pretty convinced, so it's eight for confidence and I found this a bit disturbing because it kind of subverts the whole system. So I wanted to help people realize when they have strong evidence in support of their guesses and when it's weak evidence, how to calculate confidence in a sense. For that I created a tool called the confidence meter, which you can see here this colorful thing and should I go and explain it?…

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