Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…This is pretty easy because it's a very familiar S-curve where you have, it's flat and it starts arcing up and then there's a really steep part and then it levels off again. And on the horizontal axis, you can think of cost or effort and on the vertical axis, it's value or convenience. It depends exactly what you're talking about, but the idea is the first bit of effort you put into something doesn't result in a huge amount of value. And then there's some magic threshold where it produces an enormous amount of value and then continued investment doesn't really pay off. The most basic example I can think of is let's say you're making a hammer, and on that bottom axis, it's now quality, and if the hammer has a handle that breaks with any impact, then is totally useless. And if you make it a little bit stronger, it's still pretty useless and it's like junk, junk, junk, junk, junk. Okay, good, great. Then it doesn't matter anymore. If you're making an app, okay, this app's going to have users and so let's make a user's table and a database, and so far you have generated no value. The reason I felt like this was so important is because we would talk about a feature, and usually features are thought of as a binary. You either have this feature or you don't. The argument I guess was have we just not invested enough in this or have we got all the value or convenience or quality or whatever that we could get out of this? And we had pointed diminishing returns and it just doesn't matter. I think in many cases, people will add a feature, it's not good enough and so people don't use it or appreciate it, but now you've added some complexity to the app and then people give up or take it back or they try something in testing and they don't get the results they want, and so they decide that this a thing is worth doing. We would try to really investigate and decide whether we were on the first shallow part of the curve, the second shallow part of the curve, or we're just coming up to it. So I think it's a lot easier to understand the value of this when you're talking about a specific app and a specific feature, but I think it was ultimately helpful in getting people to understand whether something was worth it or not. So just to mirror back what I'm hearing, there's this, if you visualize this curve at the bottom, it's like I don't even know what this is. And then up the curve is like, okay, I sort of get it. And then at the top is, okay, I can't live without this now that I understand what this is for, it feels like it's a really a different way of thinking about getting to the aha moment for someone where they see, okay, saved items, I get it, I need to use this constantly. It feels like this works both for a specific feature and also just for Slack, getting people to even understand here's what Slack can do for you. And then now I can't live without Slack. And essentially this is a lens you use to figure out where to spend product resources because if you don't get up that curve to I get it and I can't live without it, nothing else matters. Is that the framework? Yeah, and I think then you layer on another concept like the, Bezos used the term divine discontent. The line actually moves because once people are familiar with a piece of software or the way a feature is implemented or something like that, their standards go up, and so there's this competition. And again, this axis can be, utility is the best general term for it, but it could be quality, convenience, speed, it could be any number of things, but as you improve your search capability or as you improve your login experience or your forget password experience or your checkout experience or whatever everyone else is as well. And so there's this continued investment and when forget about thinking about a new feature, you're looking at how the product works overall and usually things get implemented once, and then if they're lucky, they get improved upon periodically. Most things get improved upon very infrequently and some things get improved upon never. I want to give an example at the absolute extreme because I actually don't know how long this has been, but I try not to criticize other people's software so much because I'm very familiar with the trade-offs and prioritization and how hard it can be and blah, blah, blah, blah. But okay, so most people have the Gmail Calendar app on their phone. I travel a fair bit. I'm mostly in the Eastern Time Zone, sometimes in Mountain Time, sometimes in Pacific, sometimes in English time, and sometimes in Japan, Central Europe. There's maybe 10 time zones, 12 time zones that I would ever choose. When you hit the option to set the time zone on an event in Google Calendar, on the iOS app, it presents all the time zones in the world in alphabetical order. And I mean, there's probably worse orderings, but there's no value in that. And even when you start searching, it still presents them in alphabetical order by country with that turn. So if I'm in California and I'm trying to set the appointment for next week when I'm back in New York and I type in E-A-S-T and I get a bunch of garbage, okay, Eastern, and then the first one is Eastern Australia, New South Wales, and then Eastern Australia, Queensland, and then Eastern Australia, Daylight Savings and Eastern Australia standard time. And then you're like, "Well, fuck, I can't remember which one is Daylight Savings and which one is standard time?" I could keep going like this for a while. This is an app that's used by at least hundreds of millions of people, presumably every single Google employee. It's bananas how bad it is. There's so many, there's all these clever things you could do. Like you know me, I'm on the West Coast, first option should be the East Coast and vice versa. But it definitely shouldn't be that every time zone is presented with equal value. I don't a couple hundred time zones. I grew up in Canada. Newfoundland has its own time zone, which is offset by half an hour. The population of Newfoundland has about half a million people.…

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