Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Obviously it's difficult to do that in the abstract for another company, and it may not work for every company and every product. But, for example, one of the reasons we found this to be so effective so far is, if you pick the right feeling, it typically tracks pretty closely with the metric you care about. So, for example, we don't have a growth team and we have no semblance of growth projects. However, in many of the new features that we put out into the world, we want people to feel surprise or joy or an emotion like that. Guess what? When people feel that way, they go, "Oh, my God, what was that?" And they start telling their friends and family about it, and they start dropping a screenshot in Slack, et cetera. So, there's one example on the consumer side. I've never built traditional enterprise software selling to CIOs, et cetera. But I can imagine maybe someone in the IT department of a large enterprise wants to feel smart, or wants to feel ahead of the curve or wants to feel secure and ease at what they're doing. I think sometimes we just forget that whoever your buyer is, or whatever your business objective, at the end of the day we're a bunch of people in a bunch of rooms at the other side of these screens. And just thinking about that person, it could be a buyer, it could be a customer. But I think the truth is the answer to the question Lenny is, when I was earlier in my career, I was searching for the answers or the way to do things, the right, the wrong, the binary. I think anyone that's been doing this or anything for a while learns that it's all nuanced. It's a spectrum. It depends. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But I think the true answer, Lenny, is just optimizing for metrics so purely is deeply flawed in my opinion. Optimizing for feelings so purely is flawed as well. And it depends on what you are doing, what the project is and a lot of other things. But I think the reason we come out so strongly is, I do think Silicon Valley has tended so far towards optimizing for graphs and metrics, that if we can reel it back in a little bit, at least as just one company, I think that will be good. But the truth is, it's both. We need to use all the tools we can get, but I think hopefully that's one way that people can operationalize. I'm curious, just to poke out a little bit, how you actually implement that? So maybe as an example, you recently launched this Peek feature, where you mouse over, I think, a link and it opens up in a little browser that doesn't last. Do you put together a little spec of some sort of, "We're trying to create surprise, and maybe here's a metric we think about it." What's actual day-to-day operational approach to a new feature, in terms of feelings versus metrics? Yeah. The truth is I don't think we've operationalized it as formally as we should one day. And we'll probably need to one day. The lucky thing is we are a very tight group of individuals that have now worked together for a long time. So not so formal as there's a PRD at the top of it, we list out the emotions. It's much more, with that project, get Ben in a room and whoever else is working on it and say, "All right. So here's what we're trying to do for people. Here's the problem we're trying to solve or the way we fit in their day. And in that moment people want to feel very light and airy." So, for the Peek feature [inaudible 00:18:07] he's referencing the use cases. You're on Hacker News and you want to probably in pretty quick succession check out five to seven URLs. And you're not really sure which one you're going to spend time on, but you're going to open a bunch of stuff really quickly. And Peek allows you to effortlessly just peek into it, without leaving Hacker News and context switching to this whole new tab and going back and forth. So in that scenario, the conversation was how do we make it feel really airy and effortless to just whoop, pop it up, pop it back down, lightness, airiness, speed, agility. So again, it's not that we have a, "What is the number one feeling and the number two feeling?" It is much more conversational at this stage, but I am actually really excited. Hopefully we got the privilege one day to have such a large team that we have to figure out a way to do it. So, that's an example of how we think about it.…

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