Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…You kind of farm for the problems. So you keep that doc going. And so I first started this at Uber on the money team and I called it money problems, more money, more problems because I do fundamentally believe we should bring joy into everything we try to do, so have fun with it. So more money, more problems. And essentially, it was in partnership with my data scientist partners that he had a team of product analysts and data scientists and they would pair up with my PMs and we would have the UX team, the UXR team, the data team, and the product managers, and engineering get together and actually look at their problems. So that living document means that for me, if I go around at least my minus one, not just for me but my engineering partner's minus ones, and my design partner's minus ones, and we chat them and say, "What are the top five problems for studio?" They should all have the same answer. This says I've done my job because then we all know the problems. You can debate them. You can discuss them. You can have sessions where you revise and review them. But we do that and then we go into a room and for example at Uber, I literally printed them on cards and I put them on tables, scattered the groups and had people discuss and vote the ones that is the most painful because then you see the whole thing. So that's the empathize bit. I'm spending a lot of time on this because I can't tell you how many times the clarity of the problem, going back to clarity and conviction, is missing and that problem is kind of like the North star. Everything's going on, but there's a north star that doesn't move. Before you move on, there's so much there I just want to touch on that are really interesting insights. One is just this point you're making of when you're trying to develop a vision or thinking about the next step, you should be way ahead of that. You have this doc that you've been working on and consistently update and it's there way ahead of time. It's not like cool, next year's coming up, let's start from scratch and figure out what the vision is long-term. Two is there's this quote that I think Patrick Hollison tweeted that I always think about in these discussions where a lot of people think of user research. It's like user research, often people think of user research, you do user research and that tells you what to do. And he made this point, no, it should be user research updates your mental model of your customer and what they need and the problems they're having, the stock that you're writing, and then that mental model informs what to build. And so I think that's a big difference and it connects with what you also said of you should trust your gut and judgment. A lot of people discount as a PM like I should have no opinions. I'm just going to listen to what data and research is telling me. I'm not going to try to bias the team, but something I've learned more and more over time is just you should really trust your gut and your instincts exactly like you said. If I could put all the research into Bard or ChatGPT and it could spit out a PRD, then you haven't done your job. So basically I maybe panicked my team. I came in, I'm like, gen AI, everybody's talking about all the stuff that you do with creating content, but what I want you to think about is what is the value add you bring that I can't just put into an AI right now and say, "Tell me the big thing based on this research that exists." So I've never heard that quote from Patrick Hollison, but I agree. It's spot on. And I think this is where when you think about the qualities of a product manager, I think there are four pillars, product sense, leadership, execution promise, and technical ability. And it's not product logic. It's product sense.. It's a feeling, right? It's a sense of what is right and that the exposure to products and the curiosity will refine that sense over time. And I think that's the thing that people undervalue a lot. It's like you start program managing and just spitting out what engineering said we can't do and UX said they could do and you become this. That's not the job. The job is clarity and bringing this kind of context really to the set of problems that are being solved and you're curing them together. That's the key there. It's like you're curating those problems together.…

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