Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…We're human. We should let ourselves be human. I think it's beautiful. We're logic systems, but we're also heart systems and body systems and soul systems. So, all of it is good. Okay, I want to go in a completely different direction. The last thing I want to talk about, I needed to mention this. I don't know if you've seen this, but I've been doing research on which companies produce the best product leaders. And I've been doing this by looking at which alumni of companies go on to become CPOs at the highest rate, get promoted the most at their next job, become the first product manager at a future startup, start their own companies. Intercom is coming number one across this research next to Palantir and Stripe, Revolut. So, the question this begs is, what are you guys doing that produces such great product leaders? There's the hiring piece and then there's what they do at Intercom piece. So, what do you think is creating these sort of really big successes from your alumni group? Yeah, I don't have a really succinct answer unfortunately. I can say in the abstract, our culture is a very producty culture. So, myself and Des, there was four founders and me and Des Traynor drove a lot, like all the strategy. We're product guys. I was a software designer. I studied computer science, so I'm technical, but never did it professionally. So, the first part is that just product innovation, design just was just core to our culture and people always picked up on that. So, I think good people wanted to work here and we were good at finding good people. The other part was that because we had this sprawling strategy, we had all these products that we needed a complex structure for it and that included lots of PMs and PM groups that we gave a lot of autonomy to. And so the product of our big messy strategy was that we had PMs that got to act like mini CEOs. And so I think that they got to learn the broader skill sets beyond designing wireframes and interviewing some customers. They really own it like a mini CEO to some degree. I think there's one other thing which is part to our approach was this deeply first principles thinking methodology almost to a fault, although I don't think it's a fault. I and we would create frameworks for everything. It's like, okay, we want to do these events. Who are the events for? What is the ultimate goal of the event? What's the mechanism by which events work? What are other mechanisms that can achieve that same goal? How do we define success for an event like that? How does the user or the attendee define value? What other things do those people find valuable? We create these complex systems to try and approach everything, but the net effect was we'd have really joined up considered strategy and it's everywhere. Like Paul Adams, our chief product officer, I didn't even plan to show this. He made this book recently, The AI Age and the Transformation of Customer Service and it's a bunch of frameworks for how to think about AI, et cetera. So, it's part of what we do. And so we would hire people who are good at that, but we teach that. That's teachable and not everyone does that. And so the conversations that Des and I would have, we still love being on whiteboards. Our very first office, our own office in Dublin, it was a tiny office. One wall was four, five computers, the other wall was just all whiteboards. We loved that we had a whiteboard wall. In our next office we had a room, square room and all walls were whiteboards. So, we just love to draw diagrams so you can teach all that stuff. So, yeah, it's just all that good energy product, product energy, first principles, the people we chose. And on the founders side, I was talking to Des about this morning, why have so many Intercom people gone on to be founders? I think it's because we hired founder types and my pitch to people was always come to Intercom, figure out how great companies are built and build it with us and then go on to start your own.…

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