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
24 published records
01 / recommendation
“I love the Design Sprint by Google. I also really Julie's book around managing people how to be a good manager. That one's really great. And so those are my more business side of the house books. And then we can also talk about fantasy stuff if you want. But-”
02 / recommendation
“I love the Design Sprint by Google. I also really Julie's book around managing people how to be a good manager.”
03 / belief
“JZ, I think we've made a maximally lovable podcast episode. Thank you so much for being here.”
04 / belief
“I think we should have known that or we should have dug into that more at the very beginning and then to get very tailored instead of one blunt instrument to solve it all, "Hey, we're going to go inspect.”
05 / uncertainty
“Definitely everyone on my direct team and definitely everyone on the leadership team, so call it those two combined were maybe, I don't know, like 20 or so people, 25 people.”
06 / uncertainty
“I don't know if there's one thing, but it's almost like every day I'm thinking about small tweaks and process to make all of us more efficient.”
07 / belief
“How long it takes for the thing to sync is a big part of the experience of using Dropbox. And so I think that is a big, big learning where it's really understanding that would've shifted your investments into doing that performance work as opposed to chasing the competitive space.”
08 / uncertainty
“Very recently, so have been investing in a couple of new features, memberships and logic, new functionality for our users. And what we realized at the end of the day after investing in these areas, we were like, "Hey, we can get to minimal viable, but we don't know if we can actually get to minimal lovable in a way that our users really, really want.”
09 / belief
“Funny story, I think I literally had a board meeting the day before I went in for a checkup, and then in the checkup they're like, "You're in labor.”
10 / belief
“I think something that is really hard to untrain, but I think every human does it, is you jump to solutions.”
11 / belief
“Much of what I just heard is you just worked incredibly hard and just got shit done. And I think that's very, very important and often leads to a lot of success.”
12 / belief
“I remember talking to one of our colleagues, Mike Lewis, who was leading a different team with Airbnb, and he was just like, "Oh, I realized I'm the person that should be saying, 'No, we shouldn't do this now'" because he was the head of product for one of the new [inaudible 00:14:09].”
13 / uncertainty
“One is Airbnb and Brian and many great leaders are famous for imagining the ideal situation, imagining the great end result and then working backwards. And often that leads to great results when you're being really ambitious and "I don't know how we're going to get there, we're just going to shoot big and hopefully we figure it out.”
14 / belief
“Making that onboarding journey for the host and then discovery journey and guest booking journey really, really great. So I think that that same lesson when applied to Airbnb, would've in my head changed the way we invested and I think we would've gotten more returns, as opposed to spreading ourselves and then having things that sort of work but then didn't quite work.”
15 / recommendation
“You could be known for working on the most technically complex problems, find something that you can be really, really good at. And the reason I give that advice is because when you do that, you can crush the projects that you get because you're making a name for yourself, reputation, and then you are giving more responsibility.”
16 / evaluation
“You actually have very little true authority because you don't actually manage anyone.”
17 / preference
“I think every team takes it and tweaks it a little bit, but I'm a big believer of bringing those artifacts back and then sharing them across the team. And so product operations is also a function that we've invested in because it just really greases the wheels, gets all of our teams speaking the same language.”
18 / preference
“I love... It's not recent, but I do love the SNOO and it's very top of mind because I just graduated my second son from the SNOO and it was a little bit like, "Oh my gosh, no more rocking of the baby.”
19 / evaluation
“I think the hardest memory was, this gets a little bit personal, but I was actually in my first trimester when we were going through all of these layoffs and I basically was faced with a choice.”
20 / evaluation
“Yeah, I'm a big fan of docs and decks are obviously helpful if you're talking live, but I do think in a remote-first culture or lots of us are in hybrid remote cultures it's hard because decks typically require a voiceover.”
21 / recommendation
“It's very difficult to learn the product in the first 90 days, especially if I was also prioritizing all these conversations with the team. And so I think that again, without the time constraint, what I would recommend is to be like, "Hey, every product leader has to take the time to really go deep on the product.”
22 / evaluation
“" And it was a very, very small team and it had a very, very tight deadline. So when you're like, "I can do something like this," you end up getting more responsibility because people were like, "Oh, she was able to do something that was really hard with a small team," and so that's how you get more responsibility.”
23 / prediction
“It was a lot of learning. And I think probably a lot of people, even right now through the macroeconomic downturn, they're learning that lesson in a really hard way.”
24 / preference
“Because I definitely don't want a culture where it's like you took a risk and you failed and therefore your performance is impacted.”