Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Can I? Yeah, I want to add one thing if I could, because this has come up on your podcast a few times recently, which is about the idea of people doing their own product walkthroughs. So should a PM just rely on their own dog fooding of the product and their own walkthrough to figure out how to fix it? And a couple of times recently this has come up, and I think the consensus seems to be, "Yes, this is a good thing." And I have a contrarian opinion there, too, which is that I think it is really important for everyone to dog food their own products. The problem is related to relying on your intuition about those products, which is the thing most PMs have trouble with is realizing, "You are nothing like the user. You are nothing like them in ways that will bias the way you think about what's good and bad in your product in ways that you can't necessarily recognize. Some things with a product, some problems with a product, you need a pulse to recognize." And most good PMs that I know have a pulse and so cool. But a lot of them require context of use, priorities, constraints that you just don't have and you can't imagine purely on the basis of your own usage. So what I think that means is that you should definitely dog food your own product. Doing product walkthroughs to identify lists of potential issues is a great thing to do. Prioritizing that list, figuring out which ones are more or less a problem, and for whom is an area where you should be extremely wary of relying on your own opinion, expertise, or intuition when you are dog fooding your own product. Thank you for sharing that. It's definitely come up a bunch on this podcast, so I think that's an important lesson for people to take away. Anything else before we get to our very exciting lightning round? I appreciate you, Lenny. Thanks for having me on.…

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