Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I've interviewed hundreds or thousands of researchers, and the way I usually approach that is you want a researcher who's got a Swiss army knife, because if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. And so if you give in the context of an interview, let's say, a researcher, a pretty juicy, open-ended research question, and you want to see how they handle it, and a good answer is usually multi-method. We're not going to handle it in any one way. We're going to say, "Well, here's a couple of ways we could deal with this. Here's how we could do this in a day, or a week, or a month." We usually don't have a month, but sometimes big research projects go on for that long. "And here are the different sets of methods that we can use." So see where they go. It's actually pretty simple. Most researchers are deeper in one than the other, and sometimes you can make up for those five tools with the team. So you have experts who are t-shaped, but maybe deeper in one or several of those ways. But when I built a team at Meta and at Airbnb, that was my goal, is individually as researchers build up those tools and then as a team build deep expertise that would fill all the gaps. Coming back to the main premise of your post, one of your big takeaways is, "Researchers need to be much more business oriented, thinking about what helps the business versus the user." Which I think to a lot of researchers will feel really weird. Can you just talk about your takeaways there? So much of user experience practice, not just research, but design too, is focused on empathy and very user-centered. This is beautiful. I'm not saying that we should abandon that. I think what I'm saying is there's an overlapping event, where you have the user and profit or the business. And what researchers need to do is be way more explicit about finding that overlap. So one thing, when researchers ask for advice, they're like, "Well, what should I do to be more business or profit focused?" I say something like, "Did you read the last quarterly report, If it's a public company? Did you listen to the shareholder call?" And they're probably like, "No, it's full of a bunch of language I didn't quite get." And I'm like, "Yep." So there you go. That's the language you need to learn. Scour your Google Drive folder, your internal folder and look for all of the documents that are about this quarter, or this halves, or next half strategy. What are the OKRs? Understand the metrics and the conversion funnel, know it back and forward, because then what you're doing is you're proposing, if you're in the active conversation, you're saying, 'Cool, I hear you asking that research question. I've identified this is exactly the spot in the funnel where I think we need to do work. There's an opportunity here. Or that competitor is eating our lunch with this group of users. I know that because I read the competitive report and I understand it deeply.'" So those are skills that some researchers have and a lot are building these days, but historically, last 15 years, it hasn't been a thing we've been as focused on, and I think that's an evolution that needs to happen.…

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