Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, thanks so much for having us on again. This is always a treat. This is going to be a very tactical conversation. We're going to be going through how to actually execute a Foundation Sprint. And the reason that I'm excited to do this is you guys shared an excerpt from your book where you initially shared this whole concept. It's called Click. You shared this in my newsletter and I was just looking at it, and that excerpt, that post is amongst the top 10 most popular posts of all time in my newsletter, which is especially special because it's not an AI-oriented, it's one of the few non-AI posts that are near the top 10, which just tells me how valuable this is to people. And consistently it has sat there, it hasn't been usurped, it just continues to climb. So I'm really excited to just have a conversation where we share actually how to do this. Let me just start with the beginning, just a little backstory on how the Foundation Sprint came to be. I know it emerged out of the now very famous Design Sprint, which you guys also developed. So just give us a very brief overview of just how this came to be, this idea of this Foundation Sprint. Well, maybe I'll start by talking about the Design Sprint part because it is essential to understanding the Foundation Sprint. And the Design Sprint first developed, I had been working at the beginning of my career at Microsoft for a few years. Went to Google, which is like 2007, 2008, 2009, and was working on the Gmail team, was working on some projects that were just executing well, delivering, shipping. But I had this other project, a side project that had been going on for three years with a couple of colleagues, was going nowhere, and it looked like their office was going to get shut down after the financial crisis. They were in Stockholm. I went there for a week. We cleared our calendars for the week, and we created a prototype of this, this thing because we decided, look, we're never going to get anywhere. We've tried making the perfect pitch. We've tried to make the ideal PRD, we've tried to show the ideal design, and we can't. Perfection is not working. We're not able to align people, we're not able to get executive support for this thing. We couldn't convince Larry and Sergey and Eric that they should fund this thing. In that week in Stockholm, we created a prototype instead. We decided you know what? Forget it. We're just going to build something and put it in people's hands, put it in our fellow Googlers hands. And that prototype was what became Google Meet. It was this video conferencing tool that you could use in the web browser.…

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