Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Could be your next act. It could be. I could go the reverse, I could become a professional piano player. Oh man. No, it's so fun, so hard though. I'm just like, my fingers are like, how do you do four freaking keys at once? I'm just like "What is going on here?" Okay, so let's get into the meat of it. I want to talk about growth. There's a very specific framework that as we were chatting that I think would be really helpful for people to hear and learn from you. You call it explore and exploit. I think there's a bunch of different ways to think about this. Talk about this framework and how that informs the way you think about growth. Yeah, I initially came up or heard with, heard about explore and exploit through my engineering partner at Grammarly, Nermal, and I think he actually had taken some reforged classes. So maybe the original inventor of it might be Brian Balfour, who I know has been on your pod. But anyway, it's a great concept. The gist of it is that when you're in exploratory mode, think of it as finding the right mountain to climb. And then when you're in exploitation mode, it's like focusing your resources on climbing that mountain effectively. And certain companies, I think the warning is to basically spend too much of your time on one end of the spectrum. If you do too much exploration, you can have your team feel a little bit too scattershot, just trying a hundred different random ideas. What's the through line? What's the strategy? How do you pattern match successes across them? And if you do too much in exploitation, which is often the MO of growth teams, it can lead to this saturation and stagnation where you're just locally maximizing a thing. And even though this principle of explore and exploit, it's typically thought of as a macro thing. I like to work with my teams more on the insight level. So I'll give you a concrete example. So I work at chess.com and one of our priorities is to encourage chess players to improve, to learn and improve. So one of the PMs that we have, Dylan, he works on all the learning features. The most used learning feature in our product is called game review. So you play a game of chess, after the game is over, we have this virtual coach that teaches you about your worst moves, best moves, et cetera. And his job is to improve user engagement and retention. And so he's in this exploratory phase trying to figure out how do I drive more of that type of activity? And what he observes is that 80% of people that review their games actually do so after a win. And that's really counterintuitive to when we initially built the feature. We thought that people would want to use it after losses or to see their mistakes such they could work on their mistakes. That turned out not to be the truth when it came to the human psychology and the actual data of it. And so we made some changes in the product experience. When you lose a game now as opposed to surfacing your blunders and your horrible stuff that you did, we flip it on its head and so we show you your brilliant moves, your best moves, and we have coach say something encouraging, "Losing, just part of learning, keep it up." That type of thing. That change alone was pretty dramatic for us. It grew game reviews by 25%, subscriptions by 20%, user retention by a lot as well. So that was fantastic, but the point is that it doesn't just stop there. You have to take that insight, share it broadly across the company.…

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