Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…This has happened twice to me where I worked on a team that made a very logical UX change and quickly found out that we ruined the sales demo. So, for the users of the product, the experience became a little bit smoother. It was an optimization. It wasn't something critical. But then, for the sales demo, it communicated the value less. It was harder for people as to really understand in one glance. So, a lot of times, this comes from taking something that's very visual and making it very efficient and small, so you might gain fewer clicks, but it'll make it harder for the sales team to communicate and for that ah-ha moment to happen on a call, to the point where we made this change and then salespeople would send me Gong link recordings in the past and in the current demos and just show me the difference and it would pain me to watch these. And I was like, "Oh, we got to fix this. People aren't getting the value, how they even going to experience it?" Okay. I know that you have a couple more hot takes that I wanted to make sure we have time for. One that I love that I agree with, and it's kind of the thesis of this podcast almost, which is that there's no right way to get things done in a product, team, or in a business, in spite of what you may read online. I'd love to hear your take here. Yeah, I didn't always understand this. In fact, I moved continents because I had professional FOMO, so I moved from Israel to San Francisco because I believed, and actually a lot of people had that feeling that whatever we're doing here in Silicon Valley, they know how to work. That's the big leagues. And I got to work shoulder to shoulder with people who came from Apple, YouTube, Salesforce, Facebook, Slack, Amazon, Stripe. I got to work with the people who came from these companies I admired so much and I came over with a conclusion that we're all just making it up as we go along in tech, we're all just improvising, as we should. That's the beauty of it. Every situation is different, every market is different, every company is different. What it takes to win is different. And so, myself, I've had phases where I've been this zealot of everything has to be outcomes driven, and then I've gone to let's just ship as much as possible and figure it out and everything needs to be A-B tested and quarterly planning has to work this way and should do scrum or don't do scrum. And they just realized it's not that simple. It's about figuring out the problem at hand and optimizing for that and having an open mind and just understanding that we're all improvising.…

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