Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…If you're doing it right, it'll be faster and you need to have an engineering infrastructure that enables prototyping. So some engineering infrastructures are too heavy and they don't actually enable prototyping. We had a problem with our mobile apps that it was too hard to prototype and we actually redesigned our mobile apps until we got to the point where it was easier because our desktop app was pretty easy to prototype. But you have to have a layer of abstraction that enables you to do that, and you have to have engineers who have a prototyping mindset, and if you build multiple things and you have this mindset as I'm willing to throw it away, you write code that is never going to make it to production so you can just crank it out much faster and then you can see what works and then you build the production code. Until you actually get to your end goal of something working faster. But you need the engineering team to have the same mindset. The product and engineering have to work together and design because design is just in it. Sometimes you can get design engineers who are doing the prototyping. So your first prototypes are like Figma prototypes, and then you get prototypes on real data. When I was at Google, one of our teams, a front-end team, I remember we hired a bunch of prototypers and our head of front-end engineering said to me one day, this is my secret weapon. This is how we move faster. So I do think it's a mindset shift and a tech stack shift. We're going to talk about AI later, but it's also getting easier to build prototypes with AI. There's this video recently that went around on Twitter where an eight-year-old girl was building an app and in like 45 minutes, she built a chatbot using this product called Cursor. So I think that'll unlock a lot of great product on opportunities and just accelerate this sort of work. I asked about Jeff Bezos and Stewart Butterfield. I'm curious if there's another leader you've worked with that maybe is less known that you also learned a ton from that might be worth talking about. I think that there are people who are really, really good at what they do. So Marc Benioff is an amazing marketeer. His marketing mind ... After the acquisition, I got the opportunity to onstage with him at Dreamforce for ... Because Slack was a new shiny thing so of course Slack was going to be in the keynote. And so I was in the Benioff's keynote two years in a row. And so I watched how he approaches his keynote and the whole thing around Dreamforce. Dreamforce is incredible at the impact that it has on the ecosystem. And so I think that as a product, people don't think of him as much, but as his marketing abilities are amazing what he's done.…

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