Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…For example, to provide the best possible product in every country of presence, we need to have necessary licenses. In Europe, it means that we need to launch local branches of our European bank, for example, a branch for France, a branch for Germany, or a branch for Italy. To launch a branch, you need to fully comply with all necessary regulation. You need to report necessary data on customers to various regulators and authorities. You need to register with local payment systems. And each of these things, they have a lot of projects nested within. We have a very lean team of just a few people who need to scope everything and do it at the scale of 50 countries. So the way we do it is we go very deep on example of each of these projects. For example, we launched a branch in Ireland, we launched a branch in Netherlands. Then we reverse engineered what was the best process to do it, and then we went back up on top level and we said, okay, but what's the ideal framework of doing it at scale? And then we formalized it into a process really like an algorithmic process with steps and quality gates and assay needs, what people do we need to hire and how soon do we need to start doing that before we want to launch a new country. Then, so it's not only going deep, but also being flexible and doing this switch between zooming in very deep and then raising on the level of helicopter view and then understanding, okay, so this seems very, very complex in details, but then when you zoom out, how can we simplify it and build a robust process around it, which is scalable? And that's something that we have to do a lot. As you're talking and we go through this chat, I'm keeping kind of track of what I think is most contributing to your alumni product owners, product managers becoming so successful. So a couple of things so far that I think are probably contributing to this is one is just having a lot of ownership over what they're building, which leads to building skills to start companies and become leaders at other companies. So these product owners that you have are just own a lot and are essentially GMs of whatever product they're working on. And then there's this depth and complexity where you have to really get good at understanding a problem really deeply. I imagine many of these people go on to work on something like that later, somewhere else because they've spent all this time, or they just get really good at dealing with complex many layered problems. So is there anything else just kind of along those lines as I say that you think is important? I would probably add an obsession with building wow product.…

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