Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Great question. LinkedIn Learning is basically a way to learn professional skills. We entered the business in 2015 and the thesis was, we think about it as a marketplace again. You have seekers and job and oftentimes, seekers may not have all the skills in order to get the job. We're moving now towards the skills model, but without question, this other second-order impact. I don't think any of us wanted to, if you will, uberize the world. I don't think any of us wanted to make everyone there. We wanted to make sure everyone had the skills in order to learn the skills, in order to get there. Getting the learning business was really, really important for the vision and the mission. Basically, the idea was that we'd have ways to teach people skills that was very much tailored to professionals. Now, that was the vision. The way the mechanism works is, we go and get the best instructors in the world. We will bring them into a film studio. We will do it at home or in a way that makes the content extremely ... We help write the scripts, we obviously have incredible graphic, in a way that makes a teacher and someone who's an expert who may not always have the capability or the time to go and make their own online course and get them in the studio and go from there. And then the vast majority of people will probably have access to it through their company. The vast majority of the usage and the business runs through enterprise and is a large enterprise learning product. Awesome. Yeah. I'm just as a, I don't know, armchair quarterback strategy person, I could see where this came from of we're trying to help people connect to economic opportunity, find jobs. How do we help them? Oh, they don't have the skill? Let's help them build the skills. Makes a lot of sense. Okay. Within this, you have your own course on product management. Well, it's funny. I'd been thinking about a course for a while, but largely it was this concept of, I wanted to make sure I tried our own product and I understood the instructor pain point. But it's a very scary experience. It's like first, I don't know if I had anything to teach. My own concerns about that. But about four or five years ago, one of the things we started at PM internally was product university. We had our own internal university, which was basically we got some survey, we sent it out. I think everyone told us, well, it's literally the most negative one was people said, "I don't have the skills to do my job." I remember looking around and I'm like, "Well, it's pretty obvious. We hired a bunch of people, there's no PM degree, and we've done nothing." What we started doing is internally creating a product university. It was a bootcamp coming in. We tried to get from different models and one of the things we really learned was, you can't teach this just through frameworks. You needed to have a series of case studies. You need to have a real series examples. But luckily, we had a bunch of things we'd done at LinkedIn, so we started putting a curriculum against that. And then just recently, a few of us got together and we filmed the actual course for it. It's basically taking our product university bootcamp and opening it up to the world.…

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