Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…pportunity to either make her look like a superhero, because she knows what she's doing, or to make her look like a fool and one of her teenage grandsons is going to grab the device and do it for her. You're at the dinner table, what are you going to do for grandma? You going to show up as well as you can, or are you going to just let this whole thing fall apart, because you didn't think hard enough about grandma? And that's true for Toast, that's true for every product any of us are working on all the time. This is so interesting and fascinating and inspiring. I was going to ask how you use this insight, that software is kind of the most powerful medium media more than even than TV and movies, and you shared it, which I think is really important. So just to kind of double-down on this, is the advice here is think about the emotion you want the user of your software to have as you're starting the design process, not just what do you want them to do, how fast do you want them to get to this flow, it's what's the emotion you want them to have? Yeah. I often don't think about what I want them to do. I just think that's sort of a selfish way to think about it. They have something they want to do. I'm trying to help them. I just don't ever approach these things of the user's something for me to exploit and take advantage of and manipulate. I know there's people that do approach it that way, which I think is a little unfortunate. But as a designer, I guess I have my own set of values and my own kind of compass on these things that's pushed me in a certain way of thinking about it. And so I'm kind of constantly asking what's the right thing for the user? And I believe in my heart that if we prioritize that wonderful things will happen for all the metrics, including the money metrics that matter. I've never seen a product be successful that used metrics as a driver for what they were doing. I've seen a lot of companies be really successfully seeing metrics as a consequence and a way to evaluate the quality of their decisions, and then using those to triangulate and make better decisions moving forward. So they're kind of a very useful feedback mechanism. But I think there's definitely a risk to confusing, doing something because it's a driver versus something as a consequence.…

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