Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…is I started noticing that there was a certain mystique and aura about product strategy, and there was this perception that some people were intrinsically really good at strategy and others were not. And it was almost as if there was a strategy gene that you needed to be born with to be good at it. And that bothered me a lot, and I sort of wanted to ask myself, is it possible to break that divide between the haves and the have-nots and make this capability widely accessible through a procedural approach. And I have news for you. The answer is yes, anybody can build product strategy through a clear understanding of what it is and through a friendly and repeatable playbook. Amazing. That's exactly what I want to do here. The point you made about the why, I think everyone listening to this that's been in product for long enough has heard that of just, "Your team doesn't understand why we're doing this. " I've heard that a number of times, as much as you think you're killing it, there's always that, you forget sometimes to do that or you aren't doing it great. And I love that basically the solution to that is the strategy solves that problem of helping people connect the dots and understand why this is the roadmap, why this is the strategy. Okay, so before we get into it, just one more context question, what's just the best way to think about what you're about to share and also who's it for? Who needs to hear this briefly? So the way to think about this, the substance is that this is not a new framework or theory that I'm going to be talking about. There are plenty of excellent materials on strategy from ancient texts like The Art of War from Sun Tzu, all of Michael Porter's work, Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt, who's been on your podcast, Playing to Win Lafley and Roger Martin. So there's a ton of extensively researched and well-founded materials out there. So the way I would think about this is, it's more of an operator's interpretation of all the stuff that's out there and are able to package it into something that's friendly and repeatable, particularly for product people who think they are weak at strategy or perhaps have received such feedback. And just in terms of the battle-tested nature of it, I personally use this playbook about five to six times tweaking and optimizing it each time based on what I thought worked, what people thought worked and didn't work, including several times at Meta and usually leading to strong results, both for me achieving senior leadership alignment as well as driving business results for the company.…

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