Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I mean definitely I think what it means is, and there's definitely a trade-off. I think sometimes when companies specialize roles a lot it's because it's more efficient. If the engineer spends 100% of their time coding something, then it's like they're using their skillset to the max. Then, we just think that in order to build quality things or build things in a certain way it's actually better if people actually also spend some time thinking about things and not just executing. Yes, for every project there's a project lead. That lead can be engineer or designer. It's not a formal role or it's not based on your whatever level or it's just like you need to be certain title that you can be that. It's more like an assignment that now you are responsible getting the project started and working together with the team, figuring it out, and then communicating changes or communicating how that progress happens. Definitely it means that the engineers or designers also have to do these things and they do need to communicate and they do need to think about the scope or things. It's a different way of doing things. Also, not everyone wants to do that, which is fine, but we on the hiring front try to hire people that are interested in the broader scope than just the specific skillset that they have. I think those last two points are really essential. One, people often don't want to do this work and they are happy to offload it to a potential product manager. The fact that say engineers have to do all these boring PM things like communicate timelines and keep PR specs aligned and make sure timelines are hit and all that stuff and run meetings, a lot of people don't want to do that. A lot of times they do and I think in this case people seem to really want to be doing that. The other is I think you need a really high caliber team that's very product-minded and the hiring bar needs to be very, very high for say engineers and designers to want to do all these things and be good at them. I think those are two necessary ingredients for this to work out. Sure.…

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