Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedJessica Fain: belief
22 Mar 2026 Lenny's Podcast The art of influence: The single most important skill that AI can’t replace | Jessica Fain (Webflow, ex-Slack)
“Influence is about increasing the odds that your good ideas survive. And I think what happens is people actually let ego and let their own narrative, their own scope of influence, get in the way of empathy.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Jessica Fain
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 22 Mar 2026
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…I want to dive deeper into this stuff, but first, something on my mind is some people might be turned off by this topic in terms of, it may feel icky of just like, "Oh, I don't want to try to be this manipulative person, and deal with politics and influence. I just want to do awesome work. Why do I have to do this?" Speak to that person that's kind of just feels icky about building this and working on this and being this person. Yeah. I think that when people frame this as politics, they're completely missing the point. Politics is manipulating outcomes and people for your own gain. Influence is about increasing the odds that your good ideas survive. And I think what happens is people actually let ego and let their own narrative, their own scope of influence, get in the way of empathy. So, this isn't politicking, this is learning. If we treat our stakeholder conversations as discovery interviews as a way to strengthen our ideas, then we end up in a much, much better place. And if we do that in a genuine and low ego way, I'll give an example here. Noah Weiss, who succeeded Tamar Yehoshua, CPO of Slack and also former podcast guest. Also former podcast guest. What a run we're on.…
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