Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. It's funny, we ran against KPIs are basically banned as OKRs or banned and all that. And so certainly, in growth you have metrics, but they take a different form. And then in core, it truly is, do we have conviction that this is the right technical foundation to build the future of commerce? And that is built through certainly looking at data. So it's not that teams are not looking at data and using it as a piece of their puzzle, but it's not the overriding. And when we go to ship a feature in core, it's not like a team is held accountable for this metric over this six months. It's much more, did we ship the right thing? And we're going to kind of get at that through a variety of lenses. Could be some of that could be data, qualitative, just our own product sense of what's good or not. And so I think the upside of that is I think we tend to ship things in core and that are incredibly forward-facing and we take more risk. I think to acknowledge some of the downside of it though is sometimes conversations get extremely subjective about what is the right thing to do. And so that requires the right way of having good discussions, openness from all leaders and from teams to debate those things. But it does result in some squishiness, which again has its pros and cons, but taste is what drives a lot of what we're shipping in core. Yeah, I'm glad you touched on that. I was going to say, okay, everyone would love this idea of just build things that we think are awesome. It's going to be great. But then you build a whole org with teams and people building stuff. How does one know if they're building things that are good and helping versus not? And you're pointing out there are pros and cons to that. The pros is we're not optimizing for some short-term wins and driving some poor metric. The con is you might ship stuff that... There's a lot of subjectivity, and people may not agree, and it's a lot of squishy stuff. Yeah, totally. Glen, who's heads of core product, I mean one of the things that's so impressive about Glen and that core team is they go incredibly deep into every single release that is shipped. And so you do have a central eye on the quality and how it all fits together. And so that I think helps make sure there's a consistent kind of bar for taste. A bunch of folks Tobi obviously that can enforce that. So it's subjective, but it's objective in the sense that it's kind of a small number of people who really hold what that bar is and needs to be. I think if it's just subjective, let's just ship what we want without a couple people really holding that quality and that taste bar, that's where things go really sideways.…

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