Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…We do. I've seen images of this in various places, but I don't know of any company that's actually using it as the process. Can you just describe what the Double Diamond Process is and how you use it? So you might be familiar with lean startup concepts and Double Diamond as it relates to going broad, and then going narrow. So you go broad when you ask like, "What customer should I solve for?" and then you pick one, and then that's the narrowing. Then, you go broad, and you say, "What are the problems this customer has?" and you narrow, and you say, "This is the problem they have." Then, you go broad, and you say, "What solution should we do to this?" and then you go narrow, and you say, "This is the solution that we should start with." That process of going broad, and going narrow, and going broad, and going narrow forces people to get out of their opinion-driven lens because so often, we need to be curious quantitatively and qualitatively about what we're doing and why, and be more systematic and rigorous about getting there. It doesn't take long, but it just breaks the frame. The Double Diamond Process that Asana effectively... Each of our typical reviews or artifacts sit at different inflection points on the Double Diamond. So we actually ask people to do a kickoff where they collect different information at different scale depending on the size of the problem and the ambiguity they're solving. Some people have already done enough customer selection and research that they're starting with, "What are the possible solutions to this problem?" and then they're bringing the spec, and that's the narrowing alongside design, et cetera. But it's really mapping our artifacts against this notion to make sure that the product thinking has that quality of decision-making. Yeah.…

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