Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I mean, it's gotten a lot better in the last year or so, even. So yeah. There's a couple management, I don't know, rituals or takes you have that I've heard from folks that you work with, that I want to touch on. One is that you have this hot take that low leverage time for managers is just not a thing, that there's a lot of benefit you can get out of things that people consider low leverage. Can you talk about that? Yeah. Yeah. I remember first becoming a manager, and I think one of the pieces of advice that I either got from a course or a book or something, is like, yeah, "Now that you're a manager, you have to really prioritize your time and categorize your work." And there was this two by two of ... I don't remember what it was in it, but you essentially say, "Oh, these are the things that only I can do. These are things anybody else can do, and everything else, it's low leverage and you shouldn't do that anymore." And a lot of the low leverage things were just things that are really nitpicky in the weeds, or just literally, yes, probably somebody else could do those tasks. But when I think about leaders and managers that I respect the most, I actually think some of their best traits is that they choose low leverage tasks that they take on themselves, and that actually ends up being actually a very high leverage thing, because it's them who's doing it. So one example is whenever you have senior leaders who just test the shit out of the product, and they're just so in tune with it, and they dog food it, they repro the bugs, they spend a bunch of time with engineers sharing the logs and nitpicking and stuff like that. And I think that ends up being super actually high leverage, even though it's a lot of time, of nitty-gritty time, because it creates this familiarity with the product, which I think is really good. It also creates this vibe where it's like, oh yeah, this senior leader really cares deeply and they actually know the ins and out of the product, and they're rolling up their sleeves and they're giving this feedback and working with the team on it. And I think similarly to what I've seen is when a senior leader is able to fix a bug now. I think I've actually seen Mike Krieger before put in PRs himself, and it's really nice because it's like, okay, cool, we're all on this team together and nothing is below this person. And I think another thing that I love that's a little bit more cultural, is when somebody goes out of the way to make somebody's anniversary card or something, and vibe code them something super nice, or make them something, a super nice card, because I think it just shows that it's like an EA or somebody can put together the card, but this leader is just somebody who cares so much about their team that they put in the effort. So that's something I try to embody, is choosing the seemingly low leverage tasks that are worth my time.…

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