Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I think it depends. I mean it depends on the company. If you work in R&D, in labs, maybe everything is in that category and you build a portfolio. If you're a venture capital seed investor, or if you're working at a research lab, it's like you're building a huge portfolio of these bets. You're just assuming that maybe 99 of them will fail, but one will succeed and it'll make it all worthwhile. Most of us aren't in those environments. We're in places where we have real customers buying our products, wanting our products, using our products. We're like, "Let's bet the entire company own 50 things that may not work out." It may not be right for you. So I think it is a little bit of an approach. I think it needs to be thought of in a fractal way, though, because maybe at the company level, they're thinking Google once upon a time had a 70-20-10 thing, whereas 70% is our core business. It's the time we're searching ads. 20% is adjacent business, and then 10% on crazy bets that may not be anything. But I think that's at the company level. At the individual level, at your team level, you might have your own way of thinking. You're just like, okay, I've got 12 engineers on the team. We're working on, at any time, a bunch of stuff that we know we have to do. This is a bunch of stuff that we hope is like 10%. Then we're going to create some space for some innovation. Maybe it's just one engineer every sprint, or it's like a couple of times a year. You create that type of space in your own little air bubble that isn't necessarily at the portfolio level, to try things that may not work. But if they do, the payoff will be so substantial that it'll make the whole thing worthwhile. Awesome. Very helpful. Next question is around I think your most popular post that you've ever written, and maybe the thing that put you on the radar of writing, is around how to hire a product manager. Maybe this is where you mentioned donuts the first time. Is that right, or no? It's funny. I think that was later.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.