Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I just think recognizing it is part of the job. It's important. Maybe I came up at a certain time where it was often dismissed as soft skills. It's just like soft skills are helpful, but they're not actually something you want to work on. They're not something you train, not something you ... And this is just as important. This is the equal ... I wrote a piece recently about the art versus the science. The art is communication, collaboration, the more fuzzy, softer skills, people stuff. It's an elevation of that being just as important, if not more important, over time, as all this skills, techniques, tactics, managing a backlog, all that kind of stuff that you have to do. You should invest in that the same way you invest in those other skills. So if you go off to a training to learn a technique for doing, I don't know, some sort of technical dashboard analysis, why don't you go to training to learn how to have difficult conversations? Because there's some great training about having difficult conversations, or do some training about storytelling. These are all really, really important factors that start to come into play. What I would recommend is just appreciating that these are going to really, really matter and practicing and then valuing them and not thinking of them as something that either will matter later or a distraction or not really part of the job. I think the reason people don't do that work is because it's so hard. Difficult conversations are difficult. We talked about this with Trey Hass. But just like it's a rule of thumb, the thing that is hard is probably the thing you should be doing. It's like a compass point of you to the thing you should do. Absolutely. We are all about doing hard stuff, product managers. That's what we're all about. And so, when something seems hard and it seems squishy and it seems like it's difficult to put a three-step rule around, chances are it's really going to matter. It goes back to this mindset shift. That means that there's an opportunity for you to readjust your inner complexity management system to adapt to that area of complexity that you're now seeing, because this stuff really feels squishy. And so, that's even more of a reason why you want to get your hands around it and grab onto it and value it and learn and grow from it.…

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