Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…That sounds good. One thing to call out is that I think when I think about my own PM style, it's definitely not a tick-all-the-boxes style. There are plenty of things that I'm very bad at that PMs are traditionally supposed to be great at, so happy to chat about what makes sense. Okay, that's actually really cool. So, let's save that for the end, the things you think you're bad at. The way I see this is a reverse performance review. Here's all the things you're amazing at, let's just go spend all our time on that. But I think that's going to be really important. But just along those lines, what I'm hearing is there's a sense of do the things you are good at really well. This is a trend on the podcast, is lean into your strengths. Is that the way you see it? Do you have thoughts along those lines of just the fact that you've been successful, knowing you have these things you're not amazing at? Then we'll talk. It's important to have two things. One is of course lean into your strengths. I think that PMing is traditionally a sort of generalist role and people fall into it in a number of ways. But most often than not, I hear people fall into it by trying a bunch of other things and then realizing that, "Oh, hey, maybe this PM thing makes more sense for me." So, for me personally, it was I have always been a very left brain, right brain kind of a person. I majored in CS and minored in visual arts. And when I worked as a software engineer, I really missed the design side, and when I worked as a designer, I missed the technical. And moving into product was a really great way to kind of straddle both and have more touch points across the product development cycle. And so, I think that based on how you fell into it, you might have different spikes and different strengths and leaning into those is really important. But for the other things, it's also of course important to have a growth mindset and to constantly be conquering what comes next.…

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