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
20 published records
01 / recommendation
“So I talked about Thinking in Systems and Primer. I talked about Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, but I'll give you a third one, which is Don't Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff. It's a really interesting book about framing things in conversations that has really changed how I communicate.”
02 / evaluation
“The ones you like bond over with people you work with like Apple. It always comes to mind where it's just like Steve Jobs's joke, people like crazy and then they look back and that was the best moment in my career.”
03 / belief
“I think we've covered a lot of it. New book coming out. New book coming out in February, Engineering Executive's Primer, O'Reilly.”
04 / belief
“I'm just ranting here, but the way I think about this is you need to add something new to the conversation for anyone to pay attention because there's so much fluffy, superficial stuff.”
05 / belief
“Second, I think just showing the roadmap of the valuable things we've done in the last six months is really powerful.”
06 / belief
“Social news based on like what my friends are actually reading and liking merged with a global index of similar users who are interested in similar topics. It's still a product that I think Google Reader has some kind of similar components to it.”
07 / belief
“Actually one of the, I think ,highlights is that I think we're coming back this moment where we can actually treat engineers like our peers and put them into really senior leadership roles and not have this baseline assumption of like, "Oh, we have to coddle them or hide them from the real problems.”
08 / belief
“I think a lot of people have heard this term systems thinking and there's books about it.”
09 / belief
“" What I think about a lot more now is, will anyone remember what we decided in six months? Because I think people stress out about a lot of decisions, but I increasingly believe most decisions people stress out about just aren't that important.”
10 / commitment
“A common theme across all these examples is essentially constraint, deciding we will constrain our options to move faster and focus on the things that really matter.”
11 / evaluation
“I think we've all worked in companies where you roll out big changes with no data behind them because like, "Oh, it feels like we're not hard enough in how we evaluate candidates or something.”
12 / evaluation
“In solving the constraints is to me, I think the most interesting thing that strategy really does, and I think when we talk about bad strategy usually is because the diagnosis is bad and it's usually because people are exerting what they want to be true on constraints where it's like, "Hey, we can do all of these projects at once.”
13 / preference
“we just use the standard kit we already have today. And at Carta, when I joined one of the engineers, Eric Vogel wrote the standard kit and that is our strategy of the tools we use.”
14 / preference
“Two, it's almost certainly not what you're that knowledgeable about where if you just stick in your lane, I think the biggest risk to writers is quitting.”
15 / evaluation
“" So it's a tricky moment. And good EMs find the way to balance, but that's the biggest source of ongoing friction where the EMs have been told by their teams they need to do something that the PMs just have no visibility into.”
16 / evaluation
“I think a lot of people who get too far in systems thinking make the same mistake where they think reality is wrong and reality is never wrong.”
17 / evaluation
“There's two core problems. So one, sometimes the incentives are misaligned and that's hard to navigate, but if you can just be honest with each other and understand the incentives, sometimes you can find a compromise, but sometimes the EMs and PMs will be misaligned because just their incentives are so far apart that there's no way to get to the bottom of it.”
18 / evaluation
“You do have a strategy. It's maybe a little bit hard to articulate and maybe it's applied inconsistently across different layers of the product reporting chain because it's not written down.”
19 / observation
“He talks a lot about actions because concerned about this idea of inert strategy where you have like, "We're going to deprecate our old product features we don't use, but no one deprecates any of them.”
20 / evaluation
“One of the challenges is if we aren't comfortable holding engineers accountable because we just want to retain all the engineers, then we can't put them in senior roles. And so I think we're actually seeing a bit of a shift where we can actually hold them accountable, which means we can put them in senior roles, which means the engineers can actually get what they've been trying to get the entire time, but we haven't been able to because we've been coddling them a little bit too much.”