Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Totally, totally. It's interesting that you say that optics aren't as important. I think the reason I think about this as you talk about, a lot of people feel like there's the work and then there's talking about the work, making the work, the optics of what you did is really, really important. And I love to hear. Nobody wants to do that, but they always get this advice. So important, optics, how you share the impact you've done, how you represent yourself. I guess, is there anything else you can share there about just helping people relax about that aspect of their job and without being so critical? Yeah. And to be clear, I do think it's important. It can't be all work and no optics or all optics and no work. There does need to be a balance there, and I think it does change depending on the size of the company and the level of seniority. When you're an IC, you're probably hopefully doing more actual work, and leaders are supporting them and presenting and communicating that work so that they get. I mean, the optics does matter, right? At some senior level, you do spend more time on that, and it does have influence, back to the influence piece, which is like, how will I communicate an idea and the need for engineering resourcing and so forth might mean that team gets more engineers or doesn't get more engineers, or we do this project or we don't, right? Because at the end of the day, executive resource allocation is largely based on the, quote-unquote, "optics layer". So it does matter. I want to be clear. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, but to me, again, it's more about that's a means to an end. It's not about the optics itself. It's like say what the Buddha is saying, don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon. And the finger pointing at the moon could be the presentation, the OKR, you know, whatever. And it's like, that's not the actual outcome we care about. That's an input to the output that really matters, which is the work, the product.…

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