Jag Duggal: evaluation

Transcript context

…That sounds like a great idea. I believe in this hypothesis. Today's episode is brought to you by OneSchema, the embeddable CSV importer for SaaS. Customers always seem to want to give you their data in the messiest possible CSV file. And building a spreadsheet importer becomes a never-ending sink for your engineering and support resources. You keep adding features to your spreadsheet importer, but customers keep running into issues. Six months later you're fixing yet another date conversion edge case bug. Most tools aren't built for handling messy data, but OneSchema is. Companies like Scale AI and Pave are using OneSchema to make it fast and easy to launch delightful spreadsheet import experiences from embeddable CSV import to importing CSVs from an SFTP folder on a recurring basis. Spreadsheet import is such an awful experience in so many products. Customers get frustrated by useless messages like error online 53 and never end up getting started with your product. OneSchema intelligently corrects messy data so that your customers don't have to spend hours in Excel just to get started with your product. For listeners of this podcast, OneSchema is offering a $1,000 discount. Learn more at oneschema.co/Lenny. I want to talk about strategy. I know that you have a very strong perspective on how to think about strategy and approach strategy. This is something that everyone always wants to get better at. Every PM is always told you want to build your strategic thinking muscles and this is really important to your career. I'd love to hear your take and how you approach developing strategy and your advice to folks. I will readily admit, I bring a bias. I spent almost a decade at the beginning of my career right after college working in a strategy consulting firm. Right. So I bring a bias, which is to some degree, certainly for the length of time I did it, an unusual background for a product manager. When I first showed up at Google, it took me a couple of years to realize my job was not to produce a nice PowerPoint, it was to ship code. And I was doing a poor job of that for at least the first 12 to 18 months. But I think there is almost a countervailing dogma in Silicon Valley or in tech companies more generally, that strategy is easy and execution is everything. And I think that's probably because there are a small number of companies that get the strategy right, but the legendary companies that we all know about not only got the strategy right, but then executed it really crisply. What we don't hear about are the companies that got the strategy wrong, never got even into the conversation and all of their great execution was multiplied by zero. Great execution multiplied by a poor strategy is a waste of everyone's time. And because the strategy isn't clear, you can waste a lot of time executing years and years against something that was destined never to work. One of my favorite quotes from the Valley, from Kevin Systrom in the early days of Instagram, I heard him say it at a conference, this is pre the Facebook acquisition. And he was like, I don't know how old. He had just left Google. He was probably, I don't know, 20 some years old. He said, "We may not be right, but at least we are clear." And what I love about that is even if your strategy isn't right, and it will never be exactly right because no plan ever is, you will have a clearer read on if you are going off course because you have a very clear idea of what was supposed to be happening. And so I think being very clear in your strategy is really important. You've had some great guests on the podcast. Richard Rumelt is one of my absolute favorites. He's written a couple of books, one called Good Strategy Bad Strategy, another more recent one called The Crux, where he does a great service to the world by even more than describing what strategy is, focusing at the beginning about what strategy isn't. Strategy isn't an ambitious goal, it's not an aspiration, it's not a set of financial outcomes. It is a coherent plan for how you going to apply your strengths in a leveraged way against a core important problem. And that's a very, very rough paraphrase of the way he thinks about the world. And I find that we often confuse strategy with a vision, a broad idea, a very, very broad, vague aspiration. Nubank strategy isn't we want to be the world's largest neo bank. We do, but that's not an interesting way to dimensionalize the problem. a vision, a broad idea, a very, very broad, vague aspiration. Nubank strategy isn't we want to be the world's largest neo bank. We do, but that's not an interesting way to dimensionalize the problem. In 2014, we had millennial, middle-class, urban Brazilians who hated paying credit card fees and were not able to get credit in the first place because they were too young and without a credit history. And we could offer them not just a lower-priced credit card, but a no-fee credit card, which was an emotional thing. That fee got people angry and we could do that because we were branchless and digital. Now that is a coherent description of a very specific problem for a very specific set of customers with a very specific solution based on a very specific advantage. By the way, all of this predated my, this has got nothing to do with me. I wasn't there. But that's what I mean. Strategy is very specific, it's very detailed, it's very locked in. And working backwards from that I think is really, really important. And if you get that strategy right, it informs the minimal set of activities you need to do to get... ... minimal set of activities you need to do to get traction and to win, whereas if you don't have that degree of coherence, you're trying to serve all the customers. Maybe we should go to Mexico prematurely. All sorts of things happen and your execution gets very diffuse, and you can't even tell why you're not getting traction across the company, whereas strategy allows focus and it allows a much more rapid read of whether your focused bets, your concentrated bets, are actually working. You've had some investors on your podcast over the years, and they will tell you that concentration is what builds wealth, diversification is what preserves wealth. And you're a startup. You're not trying to preserve anything. You're trying to build something. It requires concentrated bets, not hedging. And because you're concentrating bets, those bets are high stakes. You need to be very, very clear on what bets you're making and why you think it's going to succeed.…

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