Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
23 published records
01 / uncertainty
“" Obviously that happens at a lot of companies, I don't know if there's an easy answer to this.”
02 / belief
“Now, I would argue that you want to measure both of these and to put a metric on each and the metric we usually use to measure value delivered is called the North Star metric.”
03 / belief
“Yeah, okay. So that's an example of something that didn't work because it was opinion based software, I think the phrase you used and then there's a different experience with tabs I think with Gmail.”
04 / belief
“I think the founders are very important, especially in the startup and scale-ups phase.”
05 / commitment
“GIST, is not about research it's more about discovery and delivery. But strategy is extremely important and you can use some of the tools we will talk about to develop your strategy as well.”
06 / belief
“I think both of them in their own way, they had relatively modest jobs, teaching or doing other things, but they always strived again to be the best they can and to deliver the most value they can.”
07 / belief
“What do you think that means?" And sometimes that manager that propose it would say, "I think the test failed, let's rerun it.”
08 / belief
“I think people over complicate this stuff and try to get so many math formulas involved with estimating impact, and I feel like these are just simple heuristics to kind of bubble the best ideas to the top.”
09 / belief
“I think there's a few telltale signs that I look for, first the goals are very unclear.”
10 / evaluation
“Is there anything tactically you found to be useful and effective in giving people, say they don't work at Google.”
11 / belief
“I think a lot of people think they have something like this in mind where they're just like, "Cool, here's our North Star Metric, here's the levers and things that we can work on to move that.”
12 / evaluation
“The PM is supposed to make all of this work, deliver on the roadmap like a project manager, feed the Agile machine with perfectly prioritized product backlogs and stories and it just doesn't work honestly.”
13 / belief
“Awesome. So I'm looking at it and I think maybe the most important piece of this is that steps aren't just like a project, like launch a better onboarding or add the step to onboarding.”
14 / evaluation
“Because not two companies are exactly the same, and it's very tempting when you write a book not to give any process but that's the part that people actually want the most.”
15 / recommendation
“Either they get extremely mad at you and they tell you to get back to work and to do what you were told and in that case, probably you need to start polishing your resume and look for another place either inside the organization or outside it because that person is not being reasonable to be honest.”
16 / recommendation
“I think for people that are listening to this and thinking about this, I think the simplest way to even think about this is basically there's a math formula that equals your North Star metric or your revenue or whatever you're trying to do and if you don't have some ideally really clear sense of what that math formula is you should work on that.”
17 / commitment
“A sub team owns each one of these steps and we will change the board very actively. So if an idea turns out to be bad we will take it off the board and put another idea in this place or maybe we achieve the goal, we don't need to work on this anymore, we can focus something else.”
18 / evaluation
“Either we are building very fast or we are learning and then we're building very slow, but I think we're using the wrong metric.”
19 / evaluation
“It created a whole new division within Google and it created a whole strategy around Google+ and we had to connect Gmail and YouTube and search to Google+ to make them more personalized in a sense and more social. So that was the idea and we went on and we launched a series of features in Gmail for a couple of years, honestly and Google+ itself became this massive project, very feature rich and with a lot of redesigns and iterations and none of it worked.”
20 / evaluation
“WhatsApp for a very long time measured messages sent because every message sent is a little incremental of value for the sender, the receiver, it's free, it's rich media, you can send it for anywhere in the world, compared to SMS that's huge value.”
21 / preference
“I prefer ICE because I prefer to fold the rich into the I for various reasons but both are valid, both are equivalent in a sense.”
22 / evaluation
“We did usability studies, we did data, we built a whole data mining team and a whole machine learning team to build the right categorization and we ended up with a solution that turned out to be very successful for a lot of these passive users.”
23 / evaluation
“I think what I would change is not have this discussion based on opinions, because when you have the discussion you come with your own opinions usually the most senior person's opinions will win.”