Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…I mean, I think the skill is exactly the right way to say it. I think you can get good at it from just a mental exercise. So you can do it in small ways. One of the things I ask a lot in product review when someone says, "Hey, we want to run an experiment," is, "Okay, what do we do if it's green? What do we do if it's red?" And if folks are like, "Actually, I don't know how my strategy would change." Cool, we haven't really thought about that. So stop and go and do the mental exercise of how it would work. And then I think it's the same thing of you can build quick local solutions if you have done the mental exercise in your head of say, well, what would happen if we had 1,000 times more usage of this than we expected? Or what are the unexpected knock-on effects that this could have? And how do you just start doing all of that in your head before you get pen on paper, before you get code in the system? And I think it helps actually unblock people to move faster too, because I think the other thing that PMs are often slowed down by is all risk. Oh, legal might, finance might, another team might. And I think one of the monikers we use internally is no, then go. As in just think through all the things that could go wrong, understand where scale will break, understand the things that might happen, and then move on anyway. Because if you've thought through all the things that could happen at scale, you're probably going to preempt a bunch of them. So I really like Elizabeth's quote there, but mine is just do the mental exercise of just playing out, if it gets really widely adopted, if it happens, if there is something that goes wrong, what will it be? You don't have to solve all of them. You've just got to think through all of them and then you end up solving more than you think. I love that. So it's essentially don't just focus on, will this be an impactful experiment? Think about what comes next and what comes next if this is true. Okay, I moved it. Particularly in a higher growth environment, you're not really looking for a 5% Statsig win. You're looking for something that totally moves the business and that has compounding effect over time. And so you just got to think through what that is.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.