Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…No email unless you're dealing with somebody external. And no, it's mostly Slack Connect anyway. Anyway. Wow, that's amazing. Okay. I have one more question around product stuff and then I want to talk about AI. So I was reading your newsletter on Substack, which we'll link to and you share this really interesting insight that I've experienced myself that I'll quote you here. One of the mistakes that I see a lot of product managers make is they over index on people who are going to be unhappy with the products they're launching. And basically your advice is not to worry so much about making users unhappy, which I think is counterintuitive to some people. Can you just talk about this lesson and I'd love to hear what product you launched that made people unhappy that you realized, oh, maybe we don't need to worry about this as much. I saw it more when you unlaunch things, you take things away there's always some set of users that are using a feature that nobody else does, and then you take it away and they're super unhappy, but there are more people you're going to make happy. So a product manager gets caught in this trap of the vocal minority and the number of people using your product ... Depends on what phase. Are you a Google? Are you Slack? Are you a Glean? But the number of people using your product today is usually unless you're a Google far smaller than the number of people who are going to be using your product tomorrow. So design it for the bigger number of people who are going to be using it tomorrow. If you have to redo the UI and the Who Moved My Cheese, people will be unhappy, but all the new people are going to be like, "This is so much easier." Then do it and deal with the people who are unhappy. But the trick is you have to be respectful and you have to be transparent and you have to explain. You have to go to people and say, "This is why we made this change." And you have to be authentic. You can't be dismissive and you can't have marketing speak. You have to really say, "Here's for real why." And you have to listen to your audience. You don't want to alienate your early users because most people ... If you made a good decision on why you moved this or why we stopped using Slack calls and moved to Huddles and you have to do it over time and give people choice and then give them enough time to move. So you have to do it in the right way. But if people feel heard, it makes a difference. I have an example that's not a product example, but I think is a really good one. It's a leadership example. So when I was at Google, there was always a controversy about something, but there was a controversy about ... It was Blogger or something. I can't even remember what it was. It was like we made a change. We were like 50,000 people at the time. There was an engineer in my team, an IT engineer that was super unhappy about the change. And I knew Rachel Whetstone, she was in charge of all of PR and global policy at Google. So huge job. And I emailed Rachel and I'm like, "Hey, do you have an FAQ or something that can help me? Because I don't know why you made this change and that I can help explain to the engineer in my team." She did not respond to my email. She picked up the phone and she called him. I had no idea she did this. She just called this IT engineer and she listened to him and she heard why he was upset and she explained her reasoning. He was so blown away that she called him that he completely changed his opinion and then he told everyone else in the org. And so it had this effect. And I learned a lot from watching her do that. She never even told me she did it later. She just did it. You just act. You're authentic. You listen to people and you're transparent.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.