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
“Yeah, I'll start by saying that I am immediately skeptical of anyone who has not read Harry Potter. So, if you're one of those people, go read Harry Potter. Maybe, it contributes to creativity. I don't know.”
02 / recommendation
“And there's this book that I love called The Medici Effect, which basically talks about how when people come from different places and you have that confluence of ideas, that leads to innovation at the end of the day.”
03 / recommendation
“How do you guys use Figma as a company?" And it's kind of interesting because I feel like we use Figma the way that everyone uses Figma, but we use FigJam on steroids.”
04 / recommendation
“I watched Dune 2, because someone asked me to co-host a premiere of Dune 2 with them, and I was like, "Okay, sounds good, sounds cool, but I need to watch Dune 1.”
05 / belief
“My take is that your scope is the world. Nothing should ever perceive as being out of bounds.”
06 / belief
“Therefore, maybe, I'm wrong," but I would actually flip that, because I think if you have an insight that other people are not seeing, it is even more on you to get people onto the same page. And so to the extent that you can shout from the rooftops about all the insights that you're learning, I think that, in and of itself, creates a more entrepreneurial culture within the company, because chances are other people will see you doing that.”
07 / commitment
“What do you think you're not good at? And we won't go too deep here, unless you want.”
08 / belief
“My take is that your scope is the world, and to the extent that you can figure out does the idea that you're passionate about fall within your company, versus fall outside of your company, that should guide the next steps in your career.”
09 / uncertainty
“I just watched Dune 2. I don't know if a more epic movie can be made. I was just gripped.”
10 / evaluation
“I imagine people listening to this will feel like, "Oh shit, I don't really love what I'm working on. I don't work at Figma.”
11 / belief
“I think that when you're actually presenting a vision, one of the most important things is that there is a single artifact that the team is creating together.”
12 / belief
“Here's all the things you're amazing at, let's just go spend all our time on that. But I think that's going to be really important.”
13 / belief
“I think one thing to call out is that one of my focuses in the early years was to ensure that this is for, not just capital D designers, but design driven students. So, we also took engineers who are very design minded and marketers who are very design minded, et cetera, because of that core belief that the most innovative solutions will come out of people that are operating at this intersectionality.”
14 / belief
“One thing to call out is that I think when I think about my own PM style, it's definitely not a tick-all-the-boxes style.”
15 / evaluation
“I would say that speaking about weaknesses, having such strong conviction absolutely has downsides.”
16 / recommendation
“We have CONFIG, which is our annual showcase to the world of what we're working on in order to get everyone to see what you're seeing and to be really scrappy about it and to really be the person who's pushing your product to its limits in the right moments. And I think what you find is that if you push your product to get visibility, maybe even beyond what the current stage of product development merits is that you have really incredible learnings because the more that you can put your product in front of people and get them to use it, the more signal you get on how it's trending.”
17 / recommendation
“" And so, I think that having- If not, at least you're not at a B. And so I think that having that early conviction, being willing to communicate it, being willing to get feedback from other folks in your team, have them react to it, then get users to react to it, is so important, but then also something that's equally important when you have "high conviction", quote, unquote, is to be willing to kill your darlings if you hear something that tells you otherwise.”
18 / evaluation
“" Right? And to the extent that you can get as many people in the company feeling like they shaped X, Y, Z parts of the product, I think that's really powerful, because, then, you kind of are ensuring that there's this constant feedback loop, and there's this constant investment in thinking about how can we collectively drive towards success, because at the end of the day, product development is a team sport, right?”
19 / recommendation
“I think that you need to understand in the event that it's a top-down strategy, what are the assumptions that led to folks believing that that is the right idea?”
20 / evaluation
“" Because I think sometimes what can happen is really strongly minded PMs can go into a conversation and can be like, "Oh, I think we should do X," even though they actually feel medium confidence about X.”
21 / preference
“" And so, then I think what might happen in those instances is you kind of start from nothing, you start from zero and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to build up from zero and gather all of these insights to get to a good place." And I think my take is that putting out an idea, even if it's totally wrong, is a much better catalyst for getting to a good solution because people are much more likely to react to an idea than to nothing.”
22 / preference
“So to see a single story traverse so many generations was very fascinating to me. And then, from a more businessy book perspective, which is maybe more what you're getting at, I think that I honestly pseudo steer clear of how-to books, but one that has had a particularly large impact on me is Creativity Inc.”
23 / recommendation
“You're going to march in a certain direction only to hear from your users that it might just be the wrong direction, and totally pivot. And in order to ensure that moments that are not discouraging, but rather, learning opportunities for your team team, it's so important to be anchored on that singular vision because then any step along the way feels like forward progress.”
24 / recommendation
“And one thing that happened during one of the meetings was I literally walked them through, this meeting, this is how I use FigJam. In this meeting, this is how I use FigJam. In this meeting, this is how I use FigJam, blah, blah, blah. And what that resulted in was I actually made a Loom video walking through my weekend FigJam, that our sales team later distributed to a bunch of companies to inspire them as to like, "Hey, not only can you use FigJam for this, you can use Fig Jam for X, Y, Z.”