Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I have worked at companies where it's both functional, product orgs are functional, where all the PMs report into the head of product who reports as CEO, as well as a GM structure where PMs report into a GM as to an engineering leader. and a design leader, and even a sales leader, marketing leader, etc. So both can work. But ultimately, you want, I do think once you have three to four PMs, you do want those three to four PMs to report to a functional product leader, just because I feel they want a mentor, first of all, they want a coach, and you want to build a product culture and hopefully discipline across those four or five PMs. Because the leverage you get, someone said this, I think a few years ago, I remember this. Engineers are obviously very important to hire, but a bad PM, you can get incredible leverage from a good PM, but a bad PM can really screw up your, like can screw up the work of 10 engineers, right? So it's much more important to hire engineers Good PM, then it is to hire a good engineer. Any good one, because there's so few PMs, every engineers that one good or bad PM can really screw up everything relative to the impact of one good or bad engineer. So what that means for me is that if you have four or five PMs, then the one way to uplevel them is to actually make sure The four together are sharing best practices, learning, hopefully building a culture. And I think it's hard for a GM who's also managing other functions to do that. So I would say, yes, maybe one or two PMs could report into a CEO or a GM or someone else. But once you get into a four or five PM team, they probably should report to a dedicated of product managers whose job is to be a mentor, be a coach, attract strong new folks to the team, hire, build a strong culture, et cetera, et cetera. And that product manager, I think they could report to the CTO, they could report to the CEO, they could report to the GM, anything that matters. But the ICPMs is what I'm more worried about. Who do they report into? I think they should report into a dedicated manager once it gets to a certain size. Awesome. I could not agree more. Another thing I've seen is a lot of companies go one direction, they go GM models, then they go back to something else where it's completely business unit oriented and functional reporting, and then they go back. So I found it just like try something, see if that works. You can always change it in the future. That's super common. I wanted to transition to hiring, talk about hiring. You recently had this incredible thread on Twitter about how to hire a leader. And I think maybe just a product leader, maybe broadly leader. And so for folks that haven't seen that or have time to go on Twitter, I'd love to just hear your advice on how to hire a leader for a company. That post actually was triggered by that morning. One of my company's CEO messaged me that, wow, I hired someone from this company. How do you know this company? How do you know this person is available in this company? I was like, I didn't know about this person. I just know this company was really good at sales. And so that's why I recommended the company. And he said, this is the third time I've hired based on advice you gave. And these are all senior leaders here. How'd you do that? I'm like, actually, thinking about it, you're right. And companies ask me, because the number one, if you ever ask a company, what's the thing that's keeping you up at night? They'll always say, one of the things always is keeping them at night. I want to hire a leader for XYZ function. And I never respond with, here's a person. I'll always say, well, You're in this space selling to this kind of customer or serving this kind of customer. Let's think about the best in class companies who's also who's very good at functionally the thing you're hiring for serving the similar type of customer. And so basically that was the origin of the post. And really what it says is in order to hire, if you want to have a playbook for hiring good folks, leaders or strong leaders for any function look at best of class companies or companies that are best of class at that function in in the similar space not your competitors but you've got to look beyond your competitors you've got to look at folks who are serving smbs or enterprises or whatever this are consumers and then say okay i want to hire say a head of marketing Great. This is the hardest thing. You've got to find the top three or four companies who are excellent at marketing to consumers, if that's what you're... Then you don't hire the person, the head of marketing at these companies. You hire the person who's reporting to them, the lieutenant. And actually, Aaron Zemos, who was head of people at Square, chimed in to say at Square, early days, we used to go, he used to run people, the people team at Square, we used to go and hire the up and coming lieutenants off the lieutenants. And so I think you basically have to build an almost an org chart. And it's not that hard, you just have to spend some time on LinkedIn, to say who are all the people in the org who reports to and you can ask some of your friends who work at the company to better construct the org chart. And you just literally go through that company and pick out the people. And I saw this in practice because once Square went public, we were the only public fintech in 2015, one of the very few public fintechs. And so my goodness, our teams were raided with the next two years. I literally saw the full team in like a huge chunk of a team in different parts of payments, compliance risks, just being graded by other fintechs. And I saw that this was being followed because you see, okay, who's the company who's best in compliance?…

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