Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. You said this thing about know the customer, know the customer, and I think there's a lot of noise out there about customer interviews, et cetera, right? But I do want to remind people that there's a difference between what the customer says, right? Customer discovery, asking them things, right? And AI is really good at that right now. You can help you get all the transcriptions, but just remember that what they do is actually more important. So earlier in my career, I had the opportunity to have a UX lab that I worked in and ethnographic research, watching what people truly were doing still is top-notch. It's the best thing you can ever do. So what does that look like digitally? It's still the core instrumentation, figuring out how people finish things, but also true customer insight comes from not using AI to read all the transcripts of your customer interviews. That isn't what it is. It's actually trying to figure out how to best walk in their shoes and whatever it takes, you've got to figure out how to do that because it's not what they say they do. It's not what they say they want. That's not the true intimacy you want with a customer. You actually want to observe them as much as possible and understand the why behind the actions they're taking. And I think that's a really important thing to point out right now because I think people are cheating with AI through interviews, et cetera, and thinking that they're going to figure it out. But there's a different type of insight that comes from what I call true ethnographic research, studying, observing, understanding the driver behind their problem or the need that they're trying to solve, and I just want to make sure we say that because I think people think AI has come to save it all, but no, it's going to give you junk because people don't always say what they mean or they don't realize that they're lying about their reasons for doing a thing. I think some of these lessons, especially that last one, is the kind of lesson that you can hear it and be like, "Yeah, yeah, I get it. " And then you have to actually learn it and find the times, "Oh wow, okay. Everyone told me they wanted this thing and nobody actually used it. Okay. I remember Ezinne said that on a podcast. Oh, I get it now." And so I think there's only so much we can do to help people learn these things. Sometimes you just have to fail, [inaudible 00:59:58] the pain to learn. Okay. Is there anything that we have not touched on, anything that you wanted to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round? I think we didn't talk about ethics and as people of color and parents. I think that having a call to action for our PMs to really be thoughtful about what it is they're building and what it is they're integrating into their product is really important to us.…

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