Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Well, because even ... Especially as a company grows, there's all sorts of processes to put somebody up for a promotion and all that kind of stuff, and the way a lot of those processes are designed is the individual that's going up for promotion tries to tell a story about what they have accomplished and then the manager's going to advocate for them. And I think in that process, there's just too many opportunities to either twist what actually happened or there's all sorts of biases that end up involving. And so me as a potential decision maker on a yes or no on that decision, all I have to go off of, being multiple steps away from this person's work, is essentially these words that are being promoted. And how can I actually make an accurate yes or no decision on that? I can't. And it works in the reverse direction too. People who are doing amazing work, but maybe not the best at advocating for themselves, or maybe have managers that aren't doing the best job at advocating for themselves, end up feeling disenfranchised and forgotten and just a lot of bad feelings emerge. And that's how you lose essentially these really talented people. So even in processes like that, it's like, how do you surface the person's work over the past time period so that the ultimate decision maker can look at that work, go straight to the source rather than relying on this game of telephone that's happening as well? And so something that we've started to try to implement at Reforge, what we're doing it very slowly, is building in regular processes for people to record the work that they've accomplished internally, kind of keep a log of it, the things that they've helped create and ship, so that when it comes to those conversations, it's already easily packaged and can be surfaced as part of that process. So I think it works in a bunch of different avenues, but it just kind of comes back. There's so much more you can glean from inspecting the actual creations of somebody than just a surface level conversation. Amazing. Just one more question before we get to our next lesson; along that same line you just mentioned of just how to actually do this. So you mentioned exercises in the interview. I think the extreme of that is something Linear does, which I recently learned about, where they have a work trial where they work with the team for five days, one to five days. You just mentioned keeping track of your wins. Is there anything else you can share of just how you actually implement this sort of lesson? Well, I think it's not even wins. It's like a log of what you've helped ship and your role in that piece. Because even if it's not a win, it's possible that you did some really amazing work, but there's all sorts of other possible circumstances for why it ended up not being a win. And that's also what gets lost I think a lot in these processes, is that somebody could be doing really amazing work, but maybe it's not an obvious win from the metrics or some other perspective, however else it's being judged, and you never do that. And so I think where we started with this, the question is, how do you make it super lightweight? And I think internally what we've been trying and we've been trying to figure this out is it's not about writing a book about your work every couple of weeks, right? It's grabbing a couple screenshots and writing down a few bullet points of how you participated in creating and shipping this piece. I will also say that this also keeps the emphasis on things that have shipped to end customers, which is the ultimate goal of most functions. You know, finance is a little bit different, like some of these internal functions, where their customers are the internal employees, versus I think ... We even had a pattern of this in the past at Reforge is people put a lot of emphasis on creating the awesome internal document. And it's like, "Look, you can create some awesome internal document, but if that's not translating to shipping something that's impacting the customer, that's a loss for the company." And I think once again, a lot gets caught up in these processes, where the judgment gets placed in the wrong places. And the last thing I'll ... For a quick plug; Reforge has created this product called Artifacts, which is a place to both store and showcase the things you've actually created in your work. You can think about it as a portfolio or GitHub for everybody. And that could be ... Look, if you're a manager and creating performance review processes or career ladders or interview simulations, all these types of things, that is work that showcases what you're capable of as a leader or a manager. Or you might be an individual PM and be involved in shipping a feature. And so we've created that place to not only store and showcase that stuff, but for folks that are coming along and solving a similar problem after you, they can use those things as ingredients to potentially solve their problem in a slightly similar, but different way as well. Similar to open source code.…

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