Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Thanks. I wanted to ask about, there's this tweet by Patrick Collison that I've brought up a couple of times on this podcast, that I think is really interesting. And his tweet is this, "In my opinion, the best product will stem from a very strong mental model of the domain and user. User research can help you get such a model and validate it along the way. But it's important to view the syllogism of UXR as model of user research, to improving your mental model of the user, to what product you should build versus user research tells you what product to build." Does that resonate in any way thoughts on that way of thinking about user research? Yeah, there's a double-edged sword we talk about a lot in the research community, which is about making recommendations for design. So the best research doesn't leave it at that. It tells you, and it's like the what, the so what, and then the then what. But the problem with that is some researchers go too far in the other direction, where they're like, "We ran this study, it yielded these insights, and therefore this is what we should build." And everyone else on the team is like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Glad to hear your thoughts on the matter, but there's a lot going on here. Maybe we should talk about it." And that makes perfect sense. That's a failure of communication. And I think that speaks to the thing that Patrick is saying, is like, "Good research can sometimes tell us exactly what the problem is and exactly how to fix it." An example of that is the multimillion dollar button I told you about. But in a lot of the bigger picture questions, especially the macro ones and maybe also the really pointed middle range ones, the point isn't really, "This is exactly what we should do and this is exactly what we should build." It is, "Let us develop a framework which is based on actual evidence, and then together as a team figure out how we want to experiment our way to a successful product."…

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