Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Usually it's [inaudible 00:05:01]. Yeah. And I remember this so vividly. I remember walking into the office and all the rooms in Airbnb's office are very unique spaces that look like Airbnbs, but of course this was the one room with all white walls and just a gray flat rectangle table. And I walked into the room and there were five of them seated around the table and they had a pack of papers in front of them, and they went on taking turns quietly reading from the papers all the things that they saw that I was doing wrong and all the things that they didn't like about me. And it was a really hard moment there. I went through all the usual stages of grief when one hears feedback, which is just immediate want to respond to be like, "Oh, well there was a good reason for that." And, "That's not how it actually was," and, "This is why I did that." But luckily I had, thank goodness, I had the sense to just listen and not respond in that way. Clearly, what they were telling me is that that was one of the things that was missing. And so I heard them out and took it all in. And regardless of each individual thing, what was very clear was that the missing piece, the theme that was across all of that is that I hadn't earned their trust. So whether how right or how wrong what I was doing was is the key piece is that I wasn't bringing the team along with me. They had no idea that they could trust in what I was trying to build and what I was trying to shape and that I cared about them and that I had their best interest and shared goals at heart. And that was absolutely my fault. And in retrospect, as hard as that was, I'm very grateful and very amazed that they could come together and share that with me. It can be hard to bring feedback forward like that. And so it was an extremely valuable learning experience and I took from that to then immediately shift how I was operating. And really a key part in building trust was to listen, to hear out what the individuals on the team were setting out to do, what they cared about, what motivated them. And so I started to make pretty fast change and still moving in the direction that was necessary for the org to make the really large impact in how we were operating, but bringing folks along with me. You can inflict change on people, but if you want to do it with them, really trust is the key element there. And then a couple of months later, we had the best engagement scores in the company. So it actually, it did objectively improve the situation and since then taken that on into next steps in other companies that I've joined and just think about instead of coming in swinging, come in listening, so that you can really set out to make change that actually has true positive impact on the folks around you and you bring along with you. Next up, Paul Adams, chief product Officer at Intercom, sharing the nightmare experience of freezing on stage in front of thousands of people, having to walk off stage, and then people hearing him curse because the mic was still on, and then how he recovered. Plus a few stories of building some of Google's most infamous product failures. Some things have happened in work, are very memorable at the time and they don't really scar you. This goes in the book that have scarred for life. Yeah, let's go long story short, I was at Facebook just over a decade ago, loved it at the time. I think it was a great place to be at the time. And basically San Francisco, I did a lot of talks for Facebook internally and externally. Facebook had a keynote slot, always have a keynote slot at Cannes, the world's biggest advertising festival. And the year prior, Zuck had been interviewed. He was the speaker, he'd been interviewed, gotten a hard time on privacy. It didn't go well, as well as they'd hoped. So the next year they asked me to do it, maybe it was the Irish accent that made the offer come my way. And yeah, I got out into front the stage of the world's biggest advertising stage, and I'd say I was like three or four minutes into the talk, a talk I'd given, a very similar talk that I'd given lots of times. And I just froze. I couldn't remember what I was supposed to say. It was the first ever time in my life I'd rehearsed a talk word for word. Usually, I have talking points and I'd ad lib and things get mixed around and it's kind of informal. This was media trained, do not say the wrong thing kind of talk. And I just could not remember what to say. I had some version of a panic attack, walked off stage, I was still mic'd up, cursed. I was laughing. I was like, "Geez, are they laughing at me. Oh my God, this is..." But I can manage to turn it around, I walked back out, I'd kind of been disarmed internally in my head, and the rest of it went well. And I was famous that night out in Cannes afterwards on whatever the seafront, it's just like rosé everywhere. I was famous and infamous for my performance.…

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