Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I'm a payments expert. I'm an ads marketplace design expert. I'm an expert in this very specific tooling that studio productions use. So, their specialist and subject matter expertise is an advantage, provided that person is willing to grow and extend into, is this really still the right tool or the right way to think about the problem? So, I think it's the layers of the stack from an engineering perspective that there's less specialty. And then tools that are unlikely to be static or to have a lot of inertia around them. I would think we would want people who are able to innovate and imagine what's the future version of this. And so, we want more talent like that. Awesome. So, coming back to the systems thinking piece, people hearing this are like, "Okay, I got to work on my systems thinking skillset." How do people develop the skill? Is it just do it for a long time, work at a lot of complex projects? I think of this book that everyone always references with the slinky on the front, Thinking in Systems. Yeah. How do people learn this? Small trick. Each problem you're trying to solve, step out one click to the like, what am I assuming is true about the broader space in solving this problem? So, I was given a task to build some new feature for the Netflix member experience. Let me take one beat and think about, what is the bigger consumer problem we're trying to solve here? What's the type of content that this feature is going to be able to support? Do I think that the way I was planning to build this is going to make sense in a way that scales across multiple content types? Or it could be something that's a capability that then is contributed to a platform set of offerings from multiple areas. Is the consumer problem that I'm solving with this feature going to be one of the most important consumer problems that Netflix is going to need to solve, as we have an expanding world of entertainment and we want to make it more personalized and immersive? Those are all questions that you don't have to boil the whole ocean. You don't have to solve for Netflix's overall strategy and who are we relative to competition. But you take the thing you're responsible for and you just do one zoom out of the problem you're solving and question that. I wouldn't spend too long in the questioning state, because then you're stuck, then you're not making forward progress. But I think that helps people to think in terms of systems, and question that, are we solving the right problem in the right way that matters for the end consumer?…

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