Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think the first ones we're going to cover are more related to startups, founder life, company, which I've been [inaudible 00:07:47] the past seven years as founder and CEO of Reforge. We'll cover some growth ones later. But one of them that I have just felt so strongly with in my entire career and what a lot of Reforge was founded on, but I didn't find the words for until I was listening to something by Frank Slootman, is just inspect the work and not the person. And what that really means is, and the way that Frank puts it, is I just think it's really hard to judge a person from a conversation, whether that's a hiring conversation, a performance conversation, or something else. That just never resonated with me. And what it's saying instead is actually trying to draw a conclusion just from a conversation is honestly kind of bullshit. You just have all these biases involved. And instead of trying to just inspect the person from the conversation, it's like, how do you go to the work? How do you see what their output is, the things that they've either historically created or currently created? Because that's, in the work environment, ultimately the thing that shows you what this person is capable of, how they approach the work, who they work with; all of these things that are a much more meaningful signal than asking, "Tell me about a tough situation you faced in your career," those types of things. And so I've always applied this from day one of Reforge. Even in our hiring combos, 80 to 90% of the decision is based on either some type of portfolio review or what we call a simulation. A lot of people call them exercises. And I get a lot of pushback from that internally from my team because it's a lot of work to come up with these things, it creates friction in the hiring pipeline, all of these types of things. But every time I've made an exception on one of those things and said, "Okay, [inaudible 00:09:50] not do it", I have regretted it. I have flat out regretted it. And so I think this is one of those things. When you're actually trying to make a decision ... So much of our work is based around people; trying to judge a person or come to a decision just from a conversation on the surface almost always misleads you. And instead, it's really just, how do you just go look at the work, the actual assets and things that they have helped create and bring to life in this world? Because I think that tells you so much more about the person. You touched on this is useful for hiring, but also performance, like how they're doing at the job, right? There's always just like, "Here's what I've done", but you look at what they've done and it's like ... I don't know. Yeah. Well, because even ... Especially as a company grows, there's all sorts of processes to put somebody up for a promotion and all that kind of stuff, and the way a lot of those processes are designed is the individual that's going up for promotion tries to tell a story about what they have accomplished and then the manager's going to advocate for them. And I think in that process, there's just too many opportunities to either twist what actually happened or there's all sorts of biases that end up involving. And so me as a potential decision maker on a yes or no on that decision, all I have to go off of, being multiple steps away from this person's work, is essentially these words that are being promoted. And how can I actually make an accurate yes or no decision on that? I can't. And it works in the reverse direction too. People who are doing amazing work, but maybe not the best at advocating for themselves, or maybe have managers that aren't doing the best job at advocating for themselves, end up feeling disenfranchised and forgotten and just a lot of bad feelings emerge. And that's how you lose essentially these really talented people. So even in processes like that, it's like, how do you surface the person's work over the past time period so that the ultimate decision maker can look at that work, go straight to the source rather than relying on this game of telephone that's happening as well? And so something that we've started to try to implement at Reforge, what we're doing it very slowly, is building in regular processes for people to record the work that they've accomplished internally, kind of keep a log of it, the things that they've helped create and ship, so that when it comes to those conversations, it's already easily packaged and can be surfaced as part of that process. So I think it works in a bunch of different avenues, but it just kind of comes back. There's so much more you can glean from inspecting the actual creations of somebody than just a surface level conversation.…

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