---
title: "Lenny's Podcast — 2022 Q2 合集"
date: "2022-01-01"
source: "Lenny's Podcast"
url: "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/"
---

<div v-pre>


# Lenny's Podcast - 2022 Q2 (8 episodes)

This file contains 8 articles/episodes.

---

## [1/8] Julie Zhuo on accelerating your career, impostor syndrome, writing, building product sense, using intuition vs. data, hiring designers, and moving into management

**Lenny** (00:00:06):
Welcome to our very first episode with Julie Zhou. Julie spent 13 years at Facebook where she was the head of design for the Facebook app. She actually joined as an IC designer and worked her way up to VP of design. She's also an incredible writer, having written the best-selling book, The Making of a Manager. She's also the author of a newsletter called The Looking Glass which was a huge inspiration to me throughout my entire career. Since leaving Meta, she's started her own company called Sundial which you'll hear a bit about, and in our chat, we cover career advice, imposter syndrome, product review meetings, hiring designers, giving feedback to designers, and so much more. I hope you enjoy this chat as much as I did.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:02:46):
Thank you, Lenny. It is a pleasure to be here. I think it's going to be a super fun conversation.

**Lenny** (00:02:51):
For listeners who maybe aren't familiar with you and your career, could you just kind of briefly walk us through your journey in design and then a little bit about what you're up to these days?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:02:59):
Okay. So, let's see. I am a first generation immigrant to the United States, and so, with Asian parents, there were really only three options that I had for a career. From the time I was six years old, I was told I could either be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. Nothing else was really in the realm of possibilities. Unfortunately, I was really scared of blood, so I couldn't be a doctor, and I only liked reading fiction growing up, so I was like, "Never really be a lawyer." So, I was always like, "Okay, right, this engineering thing," but actually, it was during middle school and high school that I discovered what I love to do is drawing and in particular digital art, and the reason for that is because I actually have a very shaky hands, and so, whenever I draw a line, it never looks good, I have to erase it, start over, and so, by the time the art was done, it was a mess. It was like here's like 20,000 eraser remarks.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:03:45):
But when I discovered MS Paint, and I kid you not, that was my very first design application, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I can draw a line, and even if it looks crummy," which it always does because you have to use a mouse in those early days, "I can just Ctrl+Z, it goes away, and just keep trying over and over again. No one ever has to know how often I tried to get to this to be what I wanted." And so, MS Paint became PaintShop Pro, and then one summer I finagled my way into a pirated copy of Photoshop because I couldn't actually afford real Photoshop, and I was off to the races in my digital art career.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:04:16):
It was actually through digital art that I realized, "Okay, I've actually amassed all this collection of art. What should I do?" And I was like, "Well, let me go and actually build a website. All these artists that I admire on the internet did that. So, I'm going to learn how to write HTML and put together a website," and that's essentially what I did on the side in my middle and high school years.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:04:34):
So, that's kind of how I got into design, but I didn't know it was design because I really still thought of myself as an artist, and I thought that the only thing I could be was an engineer, but I went in and studied computer science in college. Right? I always had this vision, "Okay, if I like building websites, maybe computer engineering is the closest thing to that," and I had this idea that maybe I could go work for one of these big tech companies, and after I took a class my senior year, that taught me what is Silicon Valley, what is entrepreneurship. By the way, here's all these stories of two people in a garage, and then they went and built something big, and I totally just was so into that. I was like, "All right, I do not want to work for a big company. I want to figure out if I can do this startup thing and make something small into something big."

**Julie Zhuo** (00:05:17):
I just happened to be very lucky at the time. There was a startup down the street from my university. It's a product I had been using for two or three years. It was Facebook. It was still a high school and college social networking product at the time, 8 million users. They were doing a lot of recruitment at Stanford, and so, that's how I decided to go and join for an internship, and on my first day I remember my mentor, Ruchi, she said, "What kind of engineering do you like to do?" And I was like, "The stuff that people see, of course. I want to be able to..." The stuff that I'd always done. Right? And she goes, "Oh, I see. You should go sit next to the designers," and that was the first time I heard that design was a profession, that it was actually a job. It was a thing that people did.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:05:55):
Back in those days, all of the design team was technical. So, we were both the front-end engineers as well as the designers, but I felt like I'd found my tribe. I had found people who kind of had always been passionate about this thing that I didn't really realize was a job. And so, I realized though as well that I had a lot to learn about design. I was never really formally trained in it. Right? I'd only ever designed for myself for me to express my creative, artistic side, so there was a lot in those first three years. I would think of my time at Facebook as chapter one, learn how to be a designer, learn about usability, learn about the actual language, nomenclature of design, learn how to think about the user as somebody separate than just me and my own work.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:06:36):
Then, because Facebook was always scaling, I got the opportunity to eventually manage a team of designers. Totally unprepared for that, no idea what I was doing, kind of jumped in, and just started to manage, but there was a huge amount of learning around recruiting, process, what even is good design, what is the way that we want to design at this company in our team, and so, tons of learnings there. The third chapter is just sort thinking about scale. Right? Learning how to scale in management, learning how to build a wide diversity of products, learning more about strategy, and how design fits into working with all of these other disciplines to build something great. So, that's kind of how I think about my time at Facebook and the various chapters.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:07:16):
The latest chapter is eventually I left Facebook about two years ago and now I am a startup founder. So, it's something that I've always wanted to do. So, go back to that, the early phases of figuring out how to build something from zero to one, and I'm working on a product and product analytics. I'm really passionate about the idea of making data accessible about... I've seen the power firsthand from working at Facebook of what data can do to help us make better products, especially for people at scale, to help us reduce the bias in our intuitions, and how we think about what is the way that we should prioritize, and I'm really passionate about the idea of making that such that every single company, every single business in the world can properly use data, know how to interpret it correctly, know how to use it to influence roadmap strategy and prioritization decisions, and make better decisions as a result.

**Lenny** (00:08:07):
I feel like that, this idea that you're working on has such intense founder market fit, and I can't wait to hear more about it when you're ready to kind of go deeper and for people to use it. But going back to your time at Facebook, you kind of made it sound like you just kind of like, "I joined as a designer, figured out design, became a manager," and then somehow you became VP of design, and it sounded too easy. That's an insane trajectory for someone to follow. Do you have any thoughts or advice on what contributed to your success rising through the ranks that quickly for folks that are kind of just early in their career maybe?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:08:36):
Absolutely, and I want to make it really clear. I always say that the first seven or eight years that I was at Facebook, every single week, I felt like an imposter. I had no idea really what I was doing. The constant refrain in my head is like, "Well, do you really deserve to be here? Do you really know what's happening? You're not really prepared for this job. You've never done this before. What right do you have to be put in this situation and get to do what you do?" Right? And that was really a constant refrain in my head.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:09:03):
But looking back, I think it probably took me about, yeah, seven or eight years till I became a little bit more comfortable with that, and after seven or eight years, I could look back, I could see all of the things that I got to work on, I could see all the ways that I had grown and learned in that experience, and something clicked for me where I realized it's kind of two sides of the same coin. Right? Being in an uncomfortable situation, being in a position where you feel like, Hey, do I really know how to do this? I've not prepared for it is kind of coin sides with the fastest and most intense periods of growth in one's career. And I started to realize, well, maybe it's not so much of a bad thing. Right? Maybe if I am constantly putting myself in a situation where I haven't seen this problem before, that's also what's going to push me to grow and learn. Right?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:09:47):
And so, yes, you asked for specific advice. I think there's two things. The first is, well, I was lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. I was at a company that was scaling, and when you're at a company that grows, there's always a lot more opportunity to then be able to try something new, right, to raise your hand, to volunteer for things to be just thrown into because somebody has to do it because it's a growing company and a lot of other people. So, the first piece of advice I have would be like if you want those types of opportunities, sometimes you just have to be at a smaller place and you have to be at a place that is going through that rate of growth. The second thing is embrace the fact that it's okay to be in a position where maybe you don't know what to do, you haven't been trained for. Right? It does coincide with that intense learning. Maybe approach it with that sense of curiosity and that sense of yes, it's hard, yes, I might be an imposter and I might feel that way for a while, but this is also what's going to help me get there. It's going to be what forces me to do the work, and in that process, learn and become better.

**Lenny** (00:10:45):
It's amazing to hear that you had imposter syndrome for such a long period of time and you basically ran design for the Facebook app. Right? And so, it's kind of an empowering, inspiring insight that someone at your level went through that for so long and made it through that. Do you have any other advice or thoughts on just for folks that are going through that? Because I had that too for a number of years, just like, "What the hell am I doing here? People are going to see I don't really know what I'm doing, and it's all going to crumble as soon as I make my next mistake." Do you have any other advice there for folks going through that themselves?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:11:14):
I think just exactly what you said, Lenny, right? I think so much of it that helped me was realizing that everyone feels this way to some extent, and that's also why I always want to talk about that, right, because I feel like sometimes you can see from the outside. You're like, "Oh, this person has this title. They have this position. They have these responsibilities. Clearly, they've made it. They know what they're doing." But that's never the case, and I mean, logically let's think about it. Right? If you're going to do anything new for the first time, how are you ever going to feel totally comfortable, totally prepared? Every time, there's something new that you hadn't encountered before, it's always going to be a little bit rough. You're never going to feel perfectly at ease.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:11:50):
It's only upon doing something multiple times that you start to see the patterns, you start to realize, "Okay, it's going to be all right." And even now the people that I talk to, the people I really look up to, the people who I think are role models and mentors for me, I mean, they regularly also share with me that it's the same. It's like they still encounter things that are unprecedented. Right? And if we work in tech, I mean the rate of change, the rate of the industry and companies and kind of these new experiences that we have, that never goes away. Right? That's just par for the course. And so, I think that feeling always exists.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:12:24):
I think that what I have learned is that there are better tools in your toolkit for dealing with it. One of them is of course me just reminding myself that if I feel uncomfortable, it's okay. Other people feel that way too. Everyone does. It's totally natural, but then to also find other pieces in that toolkit. Right? One is I am much better at asking for help now than I was earlier in my career. I used to actually just try and hold it all in. I was like, "Hey, I better fake it until I make it. If everyone thinks that maybe I'm coming to a table like I know it, then I can fool them." And now I realize I was really just, I was preventing myself from being able to get that support and that empathy and that camaraderie and that advice that would've helped me actually grow faster and maybe with a little bit less pain in the process.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:13:09):
And so, one of the things I learned is it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to reach out to people who both may be going through the same things you're going or maybe are step or two ahead of you in the journey, right, who have actually gone through that and have lived to tell the tale and can tell you it's going to be okay because often that's just what you need. You just need people to tell you, "It's going to be fine. You're fine. You're good. You've got this." And that's so meaningful, right, whenever we sometimes feel down about ourselves. So, that's another, I would say tool in the toolkit, right, asking for help, finding groups of support.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:13:39):
And then I think the third is it's also okay to just be vulnerable and just talk to people about it. Right? I found that some of the most meaningful conversations I had, whether with people like managers or whether with my own reports is when we can be much more open about what it is that we find hard, what are we struggling with, and in that way, you actually form deeper connections and people are more able to help out. Right? We can spread the load a little bit. We can put our heads together and brainstorm a better way to solve the problem, and I find that too, even as the head of a department, right, or a founder, it's like I'm not going to solve everything myself. I'm never going to have all the answers. Sometimes by just sharing what the problem is, by sharing the load, we're all going to collectively come up with a better solution.

**Lenny** (00:14:25):
I love that advice. It's so simple and so effective. Reminds me of advice a coach once told me that when you're in a new role, you are an imposter. You're doing something you've never done before and that's normal and don't feel like that's unusual. So, speaking of being uncomfortable and being vulnerable and doing hard things, you now have a startup that you've started and I'm curious. What's kind of different from the experience of being a leader at a Meta versus being a founder, especially things that maybe are surprising, good or bad?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:14:52):
I will say it is definitely a very humbling experience, but it's also exactly the journey that I wanted, and a lot of it is just going back to kind of this like base layer. When you're at a large company, a lot is taken care of for you. Right? If I have a question about, I don't know, finance or how to deal with a people situation, they're experts. There's experts in every single field, and I just go and reach out to them and talk to them and kind of handle that and help me. But when you get back to it, it's like, okay. In the beginning, it was myself and my founder, Chandra. It's just the two of us, and it was like all sorts of stuff that it was like talk about being an imposter. It's setting up, figuring out taxes, or just figuring out how to incorporate, or just thousand little decisions, right, a thousand little things that were new and different.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:15:34):
So, there's a huge amount of learning. There's a huge amount of just having to do it all yourself and realizing in a lot of ways just how many things you're bad at, or don't really like to do and that because you don't like to do them, it's hard to get them done. Right? So, it's humbling that way of just helping you realize these things about who you are.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:15:52):
I think the other thing is for me, it's going back to the idea of being much more focused on doing, working with people who are at different stages in their career. When I was leading design for let's say the last five or seven years, right, I was often directly managing senior people, either senior designers or managers or directors and so forth, and going back to working with folks at various stages, including new grads, early career folks, it was actually both me realizing I had to kind of really change a lot of how I manage, so it was, again, also very humbling in that respect. I had to change a lot of what good management looks like in that context which was different from a lot of the habits that I had built up, but it was also so rewarding. I realized I actually really love working with people who are in that early phase of their careers. It's totally different, and what they need and how to best support them is really different than what you would do with a director or very senior person, but it's also just a whole lot of fun.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:16:50):
So, that was something that is really new, and then of course, so much of it is again putting that IC hat back on, right, and it's been years since I've actually sat down and designed. Often as a manager, the thing I develop is I develop my eye, but not my hand. So, I learned to be a good critiquer of design, but actually because I stop practicing design, I'm definitely, the limits of what I can actually make and what I can produce myself become really evident. Right? And so, again, back in this new company setting, well, I have to put on a bit of that IC hat. I have to learn how to be kind of an ICPM learn how to be an IC designer, realize that there's so much that I'm actually really bad at as well and in that way, but develop and grow some of my muscles and those skills again.

**Lenny** (00:17:35):
The first point you made about having to do everything again, I remember the reverse of that when we sold our startup. I was so happy just to like, "Okay, here's a one goal we're going to focus on. We don't have to think about everything in the company all the time. I'm just going to hit this one goal, this one product. It's going to be so, so much easier." And that was really fun for a while, and then gets itchy and hard again, and you kind of want to have more responsibility and more challenge.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:17:58):
It's fun though. I am really enjoying it.

**Lenny** (00:18:00):
Oh yeah. I want to transition a little bit to talking about your writing and writing in general. I think I mentioned that your newsletter, The Looking Glass, inspired my writing in a big way. I basically modeled your newsletter and focused it on growth and product. That was the idea. Let me just do what Julie's doing and I'll do it around a different vertical. And so, first of all, I just want to thank you for all the writing that you've done over the years because it was really impactful to me. And so, first of all, thank you for doing that.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:18:26):
Oh, thank you for sharing that. It's really meaningful for me to hear as well.

**Lenny** (00:18:29):
I still go back to a lot of your writing, even though I know you've slowed down the focus on the startup which makes a lot of sense, and we'll chat a little bit about that. But I'm curious, what got you to start the writing, and broadly, what impact have you seen it have on your career and just anything in life?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:18:43):
What actually started me on this writing journey was a piece of feedback I got during a performance review cycle, and I remember I was talking to my manager and he shared that, "Hey, one of the pieces of something you should work on, an area of growth is that you have a lot of really great ideas, and you're always really engaged whenever discussions happen in a small forum, one on one, or there's like two or three people in the room, but whenever there's a large room, we're talking about seven people, 10 people, 15 people, you're just sort of quiet and you're not really telling your perspective. You're not really contributing to these larger conversations, and that's something for you to think about and work on."

**Julie Zhuo** (00:19:19):
It was really good feedback because I absolutely felt it. I definitely felt that barrier of speaking up in a large room. I think the fear could be summarized as I don't want to look stupid in front of a lot of people. And so, I had all these barriers. I was like, "Okay, am I sure that what I'm going to say, what comes out of my mouth is absolutely brilliant?" And that was really just this emotion that was getting in the way, and I was like, "Okay, I really want to work on this. I want to figure out how to get that to be less and less of a friction for me."

**Julie Zhuo** (00:19:47):
And so, it was around I think the January timeframe. Right? So, when the new year came, I was like, "Okay, here's an idea. What if I just did something," that at the time seemed really scary to me which was put my opinion out there on the internet and just do it, just do it for a year. Okay? My goal was post one thing every single week. It seemed terrifying. Right? I'm not sure what people are going to say. Again, maybe all my ideas are stupid, but I just want to get better at doing that, and hopefully, through that year, get more comfortable with that.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:20:18):
So, that's how this whole writing thing began. It came with this kind of New Year's resolution of just 52 times, I was going to click publish on something, some opinion piece. And I was like, "It doesn't have to even be..." It doesn't even matter what the opinion is. Just put something out there and just expose yourself a little bit in that manner. So, that's what I did, and I tried to not have any goals around, well, maybe people will read it, maybe it'll be considered high quality. Those are all just, again, additional barriers that I was putting that would make me even harder for me. The only goal was to hit the publish button.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:20:49):
And so, the first couple weeks were actually quite excruciating. I remember I just spent hours on this piece and I just kept editing it, and I was like, "I don't know if this is any good? Should I actually publish it?" And so forth, but eventually, I did it. Right? And again, little by little, it started to just become easier as anything does when it's done a lot. So, by week 10, by week 15, I had gotten into a bit of a cadence, and I realized something that was having an impact on my work. I realized that it became much more clarifying for me to have that space to be able to write, and it almost became a kind of self-therapy because through the week I would have all these thoughts running around my head, things I wanted to get better at, pieces of product that I was mulling on, and the act of writing allowed me some quiet time to just sit down and try and organize those different threads of thoughts.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:21:40):
I approach my writing then and I still do now as letters to myself. This is the framework. This is the advice that I need to give myself that I need to go and really do better, and that is what my writing became for me, and it was hugely helpful for clarifying my train of thought. It was hugely helpful for me to then be able to do a better job of expressing myself, and by the end of that year, I saw a huge difference in my ability then in large meetings to speak up and to become more comfortable.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:22:11):
But even after that year, because I had seen all of these advantages in what it did for my clarity of thinking, and I just decided to continue, and it became also a really, I think, a wonderful side effect that other people started to resonate with the writing. They were like, "Oh, this is actually helpful for me, or I was feeling the same thing, or this gave me a little bit of additional structure to think about the problem," and that was also extremely motivating, but I will say that what I think helped me continue the writing habit is I always did it for me. I always did it because I felt that there was a lot that I had to gain from it, and it's been obviously a wonderful experience to connect with readers and other people in the community about it. It definitely made me feel less alone. It definitely confirmed a lot of the ideas that I had about is this the right way to think about something. It led to a lot of really rich discussion with my colleagues and with people who just emailed or responded about the writing. So, that was a wonderful side benefit as well. But yeah, I really credit my ability to think better through the process and the practice of writing.

**Lenny** (00:23:14):
That's such a cool story. I love that it was kind of driven by a manager, but kind of led to so many externalities. One thing I wanted to ask you is how did you find time to this writing? People always want to write and very few people do or find time to. How did you actually make the time and keep that up?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:23:29):
So, I actually had this practice of writing even before I did this more publicly with a blog, and it was because I harbored this dream back when I was a teenager and well into my college years of one day writing the next great American novel. So, I wrote a lot of fiction and I wrote a lot of... I have four unpublished novels just collecting dust. They're not very good. I can say that now with a lot more objectivity.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:23:52):
But I did that, and I would participate in this program called NaNoWriMo every year which later I was fortunate enough to be on the board for a number of years. But what NaNoWriMo was is this idea of... It Stands for National Novel Writing Month in November. So, it's exactly what it sounds like. In the month of November, the goal is to write 50,000-word novel in 30 days, and the whole purpose and the whole point of NaNoWriMo, and again, I did it for a number of years in my early twenties, it's all about just getting the words out. Right? It's not about, hey, is every paragraph, is every sentence pristine, or do you have the right beginning, middle, end. It was like no. It was like you're going to write a novel every single day. You need to write 1,667 words, and you just do that over 30 days, you'll have 50,000 words.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:24:37):
The whole premise was, yeah, no, those 50,000 words, they're definitely going to be junk. They're not going to be really good. But at the end you'll have something that you can then edit and then you can shape and you refine. Right? And the hardest part is just getting started. It's just getting past the blank screen and the first page.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:24:55):
And so, because I'd gone through that experience, I had really internalized that writing for me is just get the words out. It is just about the sit your butt in the seat and just do it, get the word count goal out or get a time goal. I actually like word count goal even better than time goal because sometimes you can spend 30 minutes and then still just produce a sentence, and so, that was always how I approached my writing. I was like, "All right, I'm going to sit my butt down. I'm going to write for 30 or 45 minutes, but it's going to be, whatever, like 250 words. It's going to be 500 words. It's going to be this number of words." And that just gave me the discipline to just get it out and then think about revising, think about quality, think about all that later.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:25:32):
And when I got into writing my book, that was exactly how I approached the first draft. I was like, "Okay, I'm going to divide up. It needs to be 60 or 70,000 words. I have like a year. I'm going to divide it up into the number of days and weeks." And I think what it came down to for me was five nights a week, I needed to write 500 words each day, and I eventually got that down to, it was like 30 or 45 minutes. I mean, some days, a little longer, other days, a little shorter, but it was about that, and I just kept that weekly goal up until the book was written.

**Lenny** (00:26:01):
Speaking of the book, I definitely wanted to chat about that briefly. Did you always know you wanted to write a book or is this kind of a thing that emerged from people just asking you the same questions again and again, and then similarly, what impact have you seen from that book, which I own many copies and have gifted many copies?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:26:15):
Thank you. I had this dream that I would write the great American novel. I still want to do that someday. One day, I really do want to sit down and hopefully write a fiction book. So, I always had that on my mind. I don't think I ever thought that I would write a non-fiction book. I never thought I would write a business book, right? That really came about organically, and it came about because I was writing this blog and I was publishing these letters to myself that I was again putting on the internet, and then occasionally, I would have publishers or various folks reach out and say, "Oh, this was a really great article. Have you ever thought about developing that into a book?" And my answer for the longest time was always like, "No, because I don't think I have the stamina to make this one topic into this huge thing. I don't think about myself as kind of like a career writer." Honestly, there wasn't necessarily anything that I felt that differentiated or maybe a unique angle.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:27:03):
I also felt that most books that I read, there was always a huge amount of research that went into it, and I was like, "I just..." I know this about myself. I don't love research, not great at it. I don't want to sit there and compile a bunch of stats and whatnot to make an argument. But one day, a publisher reached out and they were like, "You know, we had some ideas about the fact that you're writing really, especially the part about for new managers, your advice for new managers or for people new to leadership, it really seems like it strikes a chord for that particular audience, and we have some ideas. Why don't we get on the phone to discuss?" I took that call and actually really was... That call just did change my perspective because it gave me a particular angle on something that I felt was missing in the market. Right?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:27:44):
Again, most of the stuff that I'm writing, again, they're advice to myself, but I was brought back to when I first became a manager, and I went back, I went to the bookstore one day, I was looking for resources on what it means to manage and stuff that would help me become a better manager, and not a lot of it spoke to me because it seemed like most management books were written by CEOs who had been leading their company for years and years, or it was by management consultants who didn't really seem like they had been in the situation of just like, "Hey, I was an IC on the team, and now next week I have four reports that I'm going to be working with."

**Julie Zhuo** (00:28:20):
There just wasn't that much for the completely new manager who didn't have an MBA, wasn't on some sort of ladder, and just one day got dropped and asked to kind of go and support a couple people who were starting next week. I was brought back to that moment in time and realizing there really isn't that much that is great out there that is particularly geared for new managers, and I felt that I had to really learn and make a lot of these mistakes on my own, and even very fundamentally, I don't think that people ever really explained to me, what is a manager, what does it mean to do a good job as a manager of a handful of people. Right?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:28:56):
And so, it sparked this idea that this was something that was somewhat missing in the market, that there was an opportunity to just really write something that could speak to people like me and people, again, similar to me who maybe weren't on this ladder for 10 or 12 years, especially in tech, right, I knew many people who had gone through that. Then the second thing for me is I realized that I would likely also become a better manager through this process because it would force me to think about management a lot every single day. It would force me to reflect on my frameworks for management, and whenever you think about something all the time in the back of your head, it's just more top of mind. I was looking to become a better manager myself at that point, and that was the additional boost that I needed to commit to the project.

**Lenny** (00:29:39):
Has that last piece bitten you in the butt at all, when you maybe make a mistake as a manager and people are like, "Julie, you wrote this book on management. What the hell's going on?"

**Julie Zhuo** (00:29:47):
I always tell people, I tell my own reports as well, it's like, "You might come in and you might have read my book and you might think that somehow I am a really great manager and an expert in management, and I always try. I'm going to lower your expectations. I'm still learning." There's a lot of things that I'm still working on that I know I'm not perfect at, but that's what I think it is. Right? I think so much about, for me, at least, learning to be a better manager, and I know I'll probably be on this journey for the rest of my life is that you can know oftentimes the theory because the theory is it makes sense, right? It's like, okay, we all been in that situation. We can feel. It is so hard to just actually put it in practice. It's so hard to do some of these things every single day because they're sort of counterintuitive and it is so hard to apply it to the appropriate context.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:30:30):
Just even the example I gave earlier, managing early career, new grads is just completely different than managing really senior people and being able to tailor to each individual person or each specific group of people because humans are, we're all different. We're all unique. Right? No two people are the same. No groups of people are the same. So, it is an art as anything else. A lot of it too is about learning about who I am, what am I good at, what am I not good at, how can I be more honest and more authentic to my own strengths and weaknesses, and then be able to pair that up with the person that I'm talking to or the group of people that I'm working with. So, definitely not by any means today still consider myself great or an expert or whatnot. I think everyone else, I'm still trying to get better.

**Lenny** (00:31:14):
That's a little bit how I feel where people think that I've got it all figured out, I'd be like the most amazing product manager they've ever worked with, and I feel like I could never get a regular job again, because the hype. The expectations would be way too high. People forget that I have time to think, research, process, and that kind of thing. And so, I can never get a PM job again. This is basically the problem that I've created for myself.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:31:36):
I think you'd be a pretty great PM, Lenny.

**Lenny** (00:31:38):
It's all an illusion, but I appreciate it. And then the other piece is that you pointed this out, that a lot of people don't realize when folks like us write, it's like us figuring it out. It's not like we have the answer and we're just like, "Okay, here, I'm just going to write down the answer I already have in my head." The process of writing is how we learn a lot about these sorts of things, and a lot of people don't realize that.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:31:56):
Yeah, I absolutely agree. Like I said, it's about reminding ourselves. Right? I always often say I'm the number one audience for my own writing because I'm the person who needs to really hear it the most.

**Lenny** (00:32:06):
That's exactly how I feel a lot of times. When I go back to my own pieces, like, "Oh yeah. Okay. That's what I wanted to remember." On the writing, something I wanted to ask about is you've kind of slowed down for a good reason. You have a startup to run and you've started doing more tweeting than news lettering and blogging. How do you think about that? Just, is that intentional? How do you think about, I don't know, Twitter versus newsletters and other things?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:32:25):
Yeah, it was very much. This is another New Year's resolution that came up later. Right? One of the things that I recognize about myself is I kind of have a tendency to ramble, and I've gotten this feedback as well in 360s where I'm not always the clearest communicator. I can be a pretty good storyteller and I am clearer in writing often than I am in person, but this was another area that I wanted to get better at. Right? I wanted to get better at in the moment communicating more clearly and being just a little bit sharper, a little bit crisper in the points that I had to make.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:32:56):
I remember I work with a number of colleagues who are just so good at this. Right? There will be some really complex topic, this big product thing that we're trying to figure out, and in the moment, they would go and they would say, "Okay, I see. This is what the problem is. The problem is one, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, two, blah, blah, blah, three. Right?" Everybody like, "Yeah, that's amazing. That's so crystal clear." This huge thing we're all talking past each other there now became boiled to something so sharp and so beautiful. Right? I always had so much respect and admiration for the people who could do that, and that wasn't me, but I was like, "Okay, well, as anything, if I have a thing I like and want and admire and respect, I could at least get better at it. Maybe I'll never be at that level, but I can work towards it."

**Julie Zhuo** (00:33:36):
And one of the ways I saw of working towards that is, well, let's just change it up. I'd been doing long-form, which again, works really well for these stories and this kind of more meandering prose, but what if I just push myself to communicate in a much shorter form which is going to force me to really strip away all that ornamentation and focus on the core idea. And I was like, "I'm just going to go and publish threads on Twitter for a year." Again, same thing. Write once a week a little thread and just take whatever is the advice I needed to give myself and then boil that down to a tweet form. So, also, it has helped me. It has helped me to get better at enumerating things. I think more naturally now sometimes. It's like 1, 2, 3, and that has helped me as well in just, again, the day job and the way that I communicate. Still a long ways to go. But I think Twitter is really great at that. It's really great at trying to boil it down to the essence of what it is that one wants to communicate.

**Lenny** (00:34:27):
I love that you use these tools to help work on a very specific skill that you're hoping to develop. So, you said that worked. Is that something you'd recommend to folks that are working on something like this and have a challenge there too?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:34:38):
I do. I talk to a lot of people who want to write more because they feel like there is a lot of benefits, and maybe it's because writers often talk about all of the benefits, but a lot of people do maybe find it, as you were saying earlier, hard to get started. Right? My number one advice is try to find an angle that's going to work for you because if you find yourself writing for your audience, if you find yourself writing because you want likes or you want a certain number of views, that actually is a really hard barrier to overcome because you don't have control over all of that. But if you write because you're trying to work on a particular key skill, whether it is clarity of thinking, whether it's helping you work through some stuff that's complicated in your mind, whether it's just, again, working on being more comfortable, putting your voice out there, then make it a goal, but make it a action goal. Make it like a word count goal.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:35:26):
I saw this on Twitter, I think it was that last year, the idea of the 30 days of just writing a thing every day or tweeting a thing every day. Right? You see this in design too. There's Inktober which is you just draw a thing every single day in the month of October, and I love those types of structures and programs. I think that they're a way to go and get into the habit of that. Everyone kind of feels like they can do anything for 30 days. You can do anything for three months if you just commit to doing it once a week. It doesn't have to be forever. It doesn't have to be some sort of like five-year thing and the commitment. That's a huge milestone. You just have to do it for a little bit and then reflect on it. Is it really helping you? Is it actually helping you get closer to that goal? And that's usually the easiest way I've found to get started.

**Lenny** (00:36:05):
I love that. Just creating a little bit of structure for yourself so you don't have to think about it, you just do it, and I don't care what I do on that day, but I'm doing it, and maybe one time something will come out really great.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:37:40):
That's right. Yeah, that's totally right. I think it's what really gets you interested in it is likely the thread that you want to enroll and to continue to explore. If you're just try and say what you think people want to hear, it just comes across not that genuine, and personally, not that interesting.

**Lenny** (00:37:55):
Yeah, the thing I've kind of learned is if I find something interesting, other people will find it interesting, and so, I'll just share that in some form and often ends up being really helpful to a lot of people. Speaking of Twitter, one of the threads I've liked best that you've written about, and I think you've done this a couple times, is around product thinking and product sense and how to build that muscle. And so, I'd love to just hear your advice on for folks that are thinking about how do I get better at product sense and product thinking. What are ways that people can get better at these things?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:38:20):
The number one advice that I always have for people when talking about product sensor or product thinking is it's just really about observation and it's about curiosity and can start by first observing yourself. Every time you're going to go and use something, every time you're going to have a new experience, you download an app, you try something new, it's take the moment to reflect on your emotion or your assumption at every step. Right? What was the new user experience? At what moment did it become clear to you what was going on? When were you confused? How many times did you tap something and then had to exit because you went down a wrong pathway? And even before that, it's like what even led you to trying this service in the first place to downloading the app? Was it word of mouth? Did you see something on the internet? Did somebody that you respect pitch it?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:39:07):
But these are all ways in which we're learning about how things work, how products work. It always starts by just if you first observe yourself, then you'll make a lot of progress. Right? And oftentimes it's hard to do that because sometimes we're just, we're going through the motions or we're not necessarily sitting down and analyzing every step of it. But the first step I think is just to get really good, comfortable, familiar, habitual with just that personal observation.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:39:31):
The second step is then, okay, cool, you do that for yourself. Well, that's not enough because you're not the world. Right? You don't necessarily represent everyone, but now it's to just build on those circles. So, the next thing you do is you go and actually observe and share those observations with somebody else, and so, how that often looks is discussions about products. So, you download this, why did you download this? What made you decide that this was a great app? Do you think it's a great app? What was compelling about it? And to just really find the curiosity of thinking through which decisions did the builders or the creators of something make and what was the impact of it on us users, us customers and so forth.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:40:07):
So, often it goes into then the next step which is spending a lot of time sharing those observations and critiquing. Right? I mean, our role of thumb is really I want to get better. How often are you having a conversation with somebody about products, dissecting something, and really, what did you think was good or bad about it, and engaging that because if you aren't, it's going to be harder for you to actually learn about all of those different micro decision and what its impact is.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:40:33):
And then you can go a little broader than that. Right? There's lots of really great resources. There's amazing folks on the internet who will go down and really dissect... I love Eugene Wei's writing. I love Kevin Kwak. I always learn something because they take these apps like Figma or TikTok or whatever it is, and then they really go very, very deep with their own observations, what works, what patterns do we see across different apps that are successful and that aren't. Right? And this is all helping us to understand what are these again, the key decisions and what impact does it lead to that helps us become better at then making those intentional decisions in the product. So, that's a huge part of it.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:41:13):
I think another thing then is of course you have to try and validate. So, one thing we can do is of course we look at opinions, we look at reactions. That's data. Right? That's the qualitative side. I think the other side is quantitative. So often if you are building products and you have the opportunity to run experiments, to do AB tests, or if you're working on one team but lots of other people in lots of other teams are also doing AB tests, it's so interesting to then be able to ask people, ask the product manager on the other team about what they're learning about their products, and to really be able to look at specific decisions and what causally happened as a result.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:41:48):
That's what I love about AB tests, and I think being really deep in the data and really going back to can we infer some sort of causal relationship because we're... Correlation or causation, but with causation with AB tests, can we actually pick up some of these learnings, can we look at patterns, and can we take some insights away that helps validate and confirm a lot of the hypotheses that we had about product, and just ingesting as much of that as you can also helps develop your instinct for what works and what doesn't. Right?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:42:17):
I always find people often have this, oh, design and user experience is on the other side of the coin. It's like it's a totally different industry, and they're at odds with each other, being data informed and being quantitative versus being very designer-y and subjective and caring about those aesthetics. I just think that's totally wrong. I think that there really... One helps confirm the assumptions or the other. Right? No, it is true that looking at a bunch of numbers isn't often going to tell you exactly the leaps of faith that you need to make to start something new, but they surely can help you validate whether a number of your assumptions about how people work or the way the world works are true or not.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:42:57):
And so, I know of a lot of really brilliant product thinkers who got that way not necessarily because they came through the route of subjective observation, but because they went and they were so disciplined about always studying what happened, what was the impact in the numbers and people and so forth, and then eventually you marry that of course with, well, why might that be the case, and you get into the qualitative side and the observation, but these two both support each other in helping to build a really great product sense.

**Lenny** (00:43:25):
That's awesome. There's so much material there that we could go on and on. On that last point, I wanted to kind of double-click on it a little bit. So, say you're founder and you're like, "Man, I have all these really clear vision and ideas of where I want to go with my product," and your team's like, "Oh, I don't know if this is right. What if we do a little more user research or run some experiments?" Do you have any advice to the founder of just when to rely on their gut and experience and just go with that versus doing more research, getting more data?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:43:52):
That is a really great question. One of the most common pieces of advice for founders, and I actually also had to remind myself constantly of this one is the more you know your customers, the more you can really close your eyes and just imagine everything about their life and what they're doing on almost like a minute to minute basis, probably the better you're going to do in terms of coming up with something that's going to meaningfully solve a problem for them. Right?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:44:15):
And so, that comes from a couple of different places. The first is, look, if you're the person you're building for, you're the target audience, awesome. You probably do have a lot of stuff that is instinctively known to you, and maybe in those cases, your team doesn't have that experience and they maybe can't feel the same level of conviction you do, and they might be asking you, ""Hey, well, can we validate?" and all of that. Right? It's always good advice, but sometimes, you're so deep in it and you can... You're this person or you know this person, or you did this job that probably can trust your instincts and your gut quite a bit.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:44:48):
I remember early days at Facebook, that was us. Everybody who worked at the company was either a college dropout or a recent college grad, and we were building a product for college students. I mean, we were the perfect... It was like for us by us. We understood exactly what this audience wanted. If we didn't, we would call up some friends. I mean, this was just pure target a demographic for what we were building.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:45:10):
But eventually if that's not true, and it evolved at Facebook, and it evolves for companies. You might start out that way, but eventually, we started to open up to the world. We started to add people in different countries. The percentage of people that were college grads who were like us who were using the product started to shrink, became a smaller and smaller percentage of actually all core Facebook users, so therefore our intuitions started to become less and less reliable. I remember in spectacular fashion, I think this was in 2008 or '09, we had a string of failures, big kind of launches that were failures, and I think it was because we reached the end of our intuition for the user base at that particular moment.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:45:49):
That's true for founders as well. Sometimes you're building a product in a domain where you weren't the target audience. Right? I feel this right now for myself. I'm building an analytics product. I was never a data analyst. I understand the outside, the value of data, but I never did the job, and therefore, what I really needed to do was just spend a lot of time with data scientists immersing or actually just trying to do the job myself because the better that I understand what it is and what it's like and what the company context is, and I think with, for SaaS companies in particular, you might have done the job at one company, but you probably didn't do it at 20 or 50 companies, and you're probably selling to a lot of companies so it's just way more critical for you to spend a lot of time interviewing customers because your intuition is likely not going to carry you nearly as far as if you're building, again, a very consumer product for a very consumer audience of which you yourself are part of.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:46:41):
So, I do think that, yeah, it doesn't matter that you need to really understand your customers. Do you have to go out and do the work, have the conversations, teach yourself the things that they do? It depends a bit on the context, depends on where you are, but it's never bad advice. The better you understand your customers, I think the better you're going to be able to build a product.

**Lenny** (00:46:57):
I really like that advice of just this model of the more time the founder spends with their customers, the more you can trust that they're going to have the right sorts of instincts, and the less they start to spend time there, maybe start running more experiments and doing more research as a team around the founder. That's interesting.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:47:12):
Yeah. Or the larger your user base becomes, the less reliable any one or 10 or even a hundred people are in terms of understanding the whole. Right? It's just the numbers get too big.

**Lenny** (00:47:24):
And luckily in theory, you have a lot more data at that point, and so, you can actually run experiments and start relying on data.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:47:30):
That's right, yeah.

**Lenny** (00:47:31):
Something I also wanted to get your advice on. It's something that a lot of founders, especially, and even PMs come to me around is product review meetings and designer meetings, and I know you've run many, and so, I wanted to get your thoughts of just how should companies structure product review meetings or designer meetings, who should be in the room, how should they be set up. Any advice for folks that are trying to figure that out?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:47:52):
I really believe that it's never a bad thing, it's always a better thing to have more feedback. Right? And so, often, I think you don't necessarily want to be like, "Oh, we have the one review meeting and that's the one in which we get everyone's opinions out and we make all these decisions, and then we're done." I think about product and feedback as just the more, the better. Right? And most people, again, everyone, especially with design, has an opinion to some degree, and so, all opinions are valid because they are a true opinion. The question is how do you then prioritize, how do you figure out what it is that you should do because we also can't... It isn't successful to try and do things by consensus. You're never going to get a group of people, smart people to agree about what is absolutely the best design.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:48:32):
So, one principle is, okay, great. If you're going to have feedback on the product, more is better. Try and have different sessions with different groups of people. I would advise a designer, "Hey, go in, actually do a critique with a design audience, but go and then show this to the people who are most directly working on the product because they're going to have a different set of knowledge, but then go and see if you can find some people outside of your direct team who don't have as much bias on just knowing exactly how things work and then show them the user experience, and then go and actually see if you can find a group of target customers for who we're actually going to launch, and then run some user research sessions and get feedback. "They all are going to be valuable. They all might contradict each other to some degree, but the right answer isn't because we don't like disagreement, let's just go with one and then ignore the others. Everyone is going to have something to contribute to the product because everyone has that different perspective.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:49:24):
So, again, lots of sessions, lots of user review sessions, awesome. Okay, but then there is an important job which is the synthesis of all of that feedback and a way of understanding what really matters. The way that I often think about this is we have to be absolutely clear on who is that target audience and what is the most important problem that we're trying to solve for them. Right? So, if you can get every group to align on this is who it is. Again, go and paint that very clear picture of the person, the problem, what it is that we're trying to help them with, and then what is most important. What is the job? I really love the jobs to be done for it, but what's the job that this particular feature or product is going to fulfill for that person?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:50:08):
Then it makes it easier for us to then start to categorize different buckets of feedback because the first thing that's most important to address is, well, is this thing actually valuable, is this solving the problem?, is it doing the job correctly, and if a lot of other stuff below is bad, but this is good, then we can move on to kind of the next most important thing. But if all the other stuff is maybe even good or interesting, but this is not there, then we should just actually disregard all the other stuff until we are quite certain that we've gotten the core value, we understand the user, this in some sense is addressing the core pain.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:50:45):
And then once we do that, then let's focus on the next layer which I think about as ease of use. Right? So, okay, cool. We've figured out that we validated, this thing is valuable. It does solve the job. Now, is it easy to use? Are people confused? Are they getting hung up somewhere? Is it just really slow, so no one can use it because it just takes 10 seconds to load each time? Ease of use is just about can people access the value in a really great manner. That's the next most important bucket.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:51:11):
And then finally, if it is valuable, it's easy to use, then I think we get into is it joyful to use, is it pleasurable, does it really exceed expectations, and I think that is the bar that we should aim for whenever we are creating products. Here, you might have debates about colors, or aesthetic properties, or animation and delight, and all of the other things that just make it that much more enjoyable and surprising and wonderful for the core audience. But you don't want to just focus on that and then lose, okay, actually, this thing wasn't valuable and it loaded in 10 seconds. Who cares about how great was the animation when the thing doesn't even load? So, I think there's a work to do to try and actually help the different pieces of feedback get synthesized so we understand what bucket they are and we can have the right order of prioritization to make sure we tackle the most important things first.

**Lenny** (00:52:03):
And just to be clear, this is a kind of ongoing process. This isn't one meeting where you go through all these four layers. Right?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:52:10):
Yeah.

**Lenny** (00:52:12):
Cool. And then is your advice to focus on it in that sequence generally and not focus on say the delight and so you make it through these other points, or do you find it's helpful to think about all these things at once?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:52:23):
I usually find that if you're going to go in and run a design critique or review session, it's helpful to start off front by saying, "Here's where we are in the process. This is the most important set of things we want to validate. We want to validate whether this actually solves the problem. We've validated it solves the problem, but now we validate whether it's easy to use," or something along those effect. So, being more specific about where you are, what kind of feedback matters the most at that particular phase for the team is valuable because if you don't do that, sometimes you'll just get all sorts of feedback, and some of it is you're not even ready for. The team's not even thinking about some of these additional level details or just thinking about the core stuff, and usually it follows just from how product development happens.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:53:07):
The first thing that often teams will come up with when they build a product is some kind of product brief or some kind of understanding of the user in a very high-level picture about how the product is. Usually, there's not high-fidelity mocks or prototypes at that stage. Right? And so, that's great because we're using a different fidelity. We're looking at documents and words and values and data as a way to understand the opportunity and that lends itself well to that kind of feedback.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:53:35):
But where I find that things get a little confusing is sometimes you will go and just make a prototype, and again, the goal of the prototype is to give a feeling of how it works. It's not that the team had already spent a bunch of time on the exact UI decisions or so forth, and so, what happens though is sometimes the audience or the people who are giving feedback, they can't always distinguish that. So, then the feedback goes immediately towards, "Oh, I don't like that shade of blue, or maybe we should put step two before step three," and that's not actually where the conversation is because we haven't actually gone and have conviction in just the first core piece of whether this is even the right thing to build or whether it really is solving an important enough problem. So, being very clear about where you are and what is the feedback that you want to get is important.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:54:20):
Now, again, eventually you go and you put stuff in front of customers. It's a little harder for them to just fully be able to distinguish between wait, what's the difference between the feedback versus around value versus ease of use. It gets all blended for them at that point in time though, so they'll just give whatever feedback. And again, I think that's fine. Just collect it, but then when you go and do the synthesis, when you go and do the prioritization, make sure that you're getting what you need at that stage.

**Lenny** (00:54:45):
As a colleague of the designer, say you're a PM or an engineer, data scientist or whatever, do you have any advice for just giving feedback to a designer in the critique?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:54:52):
Yes. The most important feedback I would say is focus on identifying the problem and making it really clear for the other person, the person you're giving feedback to, what is the problem. All right? And the reason I always give that is because sometimes we're all solvers and builders, and so, you often can very much get into like, "Wait a second. I see the problem. But instead of talking about the problem, I'm just going to give you a solution." So, people will say things like, "Oh, I see this," and they'll be like, "Why don't we make the logo purple, or why don't we try and add this feature here?"

**Julie Zhuo** (00:55:23):
There's a lot of assumptions that are already in place. You are giving that because you assume the current thing is insufficient in some way, and it's maybe not ideal at being clear, or it is forgetting to bring some important value prop, or maybe yellow just makes this whole thing look pukey or whatever it is. Right? There's a reason, but instead of actually stating the reason, we go straight to the solution. At that point, it's like, I don't know, maybe the solution is good, maybe it isn't. Right? But honestly, you have designers, you have other people who are just focused on coming up with the right solution. You're kind of taking that power away from them by going straight to what you think is the right solution.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:56:00):
Again, I'm not saying don't ever propose a solution. It's always good to give a suggestion, but you also have to respect that whoever is actually coming up with the answer and the solution, they're the ones who should be empowered to ultimately... They know the most about the problem. They've thought about it the longest. Right? Help them understand what you think the problem is with whatever it is they are proposing. Give examples. Show them where you're getting stuck. Why is it unclear to you? Why do you think that this color is not the right color? Right? Try and paint that because when everyone is aligned on the problem, then we can all collectively come up with better solutions, and then we can kind of rate and critique the solutions against each other. But by going straight to brainstorming ideas, sometimes a lot gets lost and people aren't actually following along on is this really the problem, do we agree this is a problem, is this actually the most important problem.

**Lenny** (00:56:49):
I imagine PMs are very guilty of this, of just like, "Mm, let's just move this button over here. We'll solve all these problems. Let's move it higher up." It's kind of ironic because PMs also don't want people coming to them with a solution, and it's funny, you kind of forget that, and you just give people, "Here's what we should just do. Let's move on."

**Julie Zhuo** (00:57:04):
Yeah. We all forget it all the time. I mean, it is a hard one, right, because it's fun. It's like we are all solvers to some degree. It's fun to jump in there and do it. But when you don't have extreme clarity on the problem, then that's what happens when you just end up talking past each other.

**Lenny** (00:57:17):
Absolutely. I've been guilty of that myself. Okay. So, I've sucked up an hour of your time. I want to let you go, but I have two more questions I want to ask in different directions. One is coming back to your book about The Making of a Manager. By the way, we haven't even mentioned the name of the book yet. The Making of a Manager, available at all of local bookstores and Amazon and every online shop, bookshop. So, a lot of people want to become managers, and oftentimes, they struggle for whatever reason. They can't make it to manager. Nobody wants to promote them. They're just kind struggling there. Do you have any advice for folks that are just having a hard time getting to that point where they can actually get to be a manager?

**Julie Zhuo** (00:57:50):
The first is make sure your manager is aware of those aspirations. Bring them in to your hopes and dreams. Right? If your manager understands your goals and what you would like to work towards, then it's much easier for you to be like, "Okay, can you help? I really want to be able to do what you do. I want to lead a team. I want to lead a project, et cetera. Help me figure out how to get there." And the first thing you should ask is what does it take. Where are the skills that I'm going to need to get better at in order for you to believe that I could be successful in doing so? And just make sure that you hear that, and make sure that you can have an honest conversation where your manager can help you be aware of what are the things that you should work on.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:58:30):
And then work together to just make a plan to be like, "Okay, cool. One of the things that I've got to improve on is that one of the roles and responsibilities as manager is go and spending a lot of time on recruiting, and I haven't done that. So, let's see, let's work together for a plan where I can start to learn some of those skills." One of the nice things about, at least, that I find about what the path to management is a lot of this stuff you can do even when you're not a manager. Some stuff you can't. Right? You probably can't fire someone and learn those skills without actually being a manager and being in that role. But a lot of things like hiring, like mentoring, like working on process is all things that you can start to contribute and help out with in the capacity of an IC. If you've identified these different skills, then find opportunities to start to practice and be able to grow those skills.

**Julie Zhuo** (00:59:19):
So, for example, oftentimes, a really great... If you're a part of a company that's growing and has a summer internship program, awesome. Can you go in and sign up and mentor and intern and manage an intern. Right? It's a very sort of small way of doing that and getting started. Here's another example. If you're at a growing company and new people are joining and you might work with your manager to say, "Hey, let me be this person's onboarding buddy. Let me be responsible for helping them get up to speed over the first one or two weeks." Or if you want a spot, an opportunity, and let's say there's documentation or there's some process that we have to change the structure of the meeting, ask your manager if you can help out with that. You can volunteer for that. You help come up with some new process for doing something, or a new way of running the meeting and just take the lead.

**Julie Zhuo** (01:00:02):
So, a lot of these things you don't need to have the official title to do. You can do a lot of it in that capacity as an IC. And again, it's also great for you to then try out. Do I like doing these things? Do these things give me energy? And as well, your manager can see whether you can be successful in this respect and then give you more and more responsibility if so. So, it's really not binary. It's not all or nothing.

**Julie Zhuo** (01:00:24):
I also want to point, there's one other thing though which is that sometimes the reason you can't easily become a manager is because your company just isn't growing. It isn't a need to have a new manager unless the current manager leaves or unless somebody departs the company and a new role opens up. I mean, you can very well have done all the right things, have the right skills, but there just isn't the role and opportunity available at your current company, and if that's the case, sometimes that's how it is, and the way that you can further your goals there is to think about moving into a different environment.

**Lenny** (01:00:55):
I did a lot of the things that you recommended, and I 100% agree with everything being really helpful to getting you to manager, and I think basically if you're just sitting there being really upset about not having a chance, clearly there's a lot you can do. All the things you shared, I found to be really helpful too. So, thanks for getting into all the detail there. Last question, for founders, or even PMs, a lot of them are struggling to hire designers. There's just such a shortage of great designers. Do you have any advice? I know, I don't know if there's an answer to this, but do you have any advice for founders or PMs trying to hire designers?

**Julie Zhuo** (01:01:26):
Yeah. I mean, for hiring anyone, even engineers too. All of us are looking for really great talent and there is a shortage. So, for designers, this is what I often advise for founders. So, the first thing is that designers want to work with people who care about design. They don't want to be like, "Hey, you're going to toss me some spec, and then I have to come up with a thing, and then I toss it over the engineer." So, the first thing you could do is demonstrate a commitment to design. Make yourself out to be someone who cares about design. Again, not because you just need to fill a box because everyone says you need a designer for your company to get that teeth, but because you truly care about it, and that already puts you far ahead of the pack.

**Julie Zhuo** (01:02:01):
So, what are some ways that you can demonstrate your commitment to design? Well, the first is even if you don't have a full-time designer, are you working with a good agency, or you have venture capital funding and you're thinking about what to invest in, are you working with someone on a contract basis just to build a really wonderful marketing side, or to focus on even the V1 of your product being something that shows that this is something you want to invest in. Because if you're going to hire someone, they're going to go check out your website, they're going to look at the stuff, and they're going to go and make some judgements about whether you seem like the kind of person that's committed to building a great culture of design at your organization.

**Julie Zhuo** (01:02:34):
But I think the second is just being somebody who can speak to and align with a lot of the values of design, and often, what that means is just, again, being really, really people-centric, having good taste, thinking about what it means to have a design organization. If you don't really understand design, you don't understand the tools designers use, you don't understand that nomenclature of how designers talk, if that's foreign, then go do the research. Go and study it. Go and interview designers that work at companies. Go and try and follow the top designers on Twitter. I mean, just immerse yourself in a bit of that culture and really get to understand what great designers value, and so, do the research so that you can... Now you're talking to a designer, you can express that, right? You can speak to them in a common language. If you say things like, "Oh, we need a designer, but I don't really understand design. That's your thing. I'm just here to do my..." Whatever, that's not often going to make you stand out against a very competitive field.

**Julie Zhuo** (01:03:30):
Sometimes when you just ask someone to teach you about their domain or discipline and you form a relationship, that person then maybe sees that you care, maybe has a friend, or maybe later on, they decide to get... There's already a relationship that you're making with people in the community, and that's often for long-term. I mean, again, it might not yield you designers right away, but in the long-term, it pays off because you will be considered a team or a company that really does care.

**Lenny** (01:03:55):
Amazing. I've sucked up way too much of your time. I need to let you get back to building your company. Where can folks find you online and maybe reach out if they have questions, and then is there any way listeners can be useful to you?

**Julie Zhuo** (01:04:05):
Yes. So, I am active on Twitter and LinkedIn. My handle is @J-O-U-L-E-E on Twitter. I also have a newsletter, although I haven't actually been as active in it on Substack. It's called The Looking Glass, and I have a lot of old articles and things on Medium and on Substack as well. Yeah, and I have my book, The Making of a Manager. So, that's where you can find me online.

**Julie Zhuo** (01:04:28):
And then you have such a wonderful community, Lenny, and very fortunate to be a subscriber, to have gleaned a lot of wisdom and knowledge from yourself and all of the amazing guests and the community that you've developed as well on Substack. So, one of the things, as I mentioned, that we're working on in our startup is just helping companies be able to use data effectively and be able to access it and make great decisions. So, if there's anybody who's listening and is a growth PM or works on the data team and would be excited to have a conversation where I can interview you, learn more about how your company works, how you guys think about data, and just learn from you, please reach out. DM me on Twitter, my DMs are open, and I would gladly take up that invitation.

**Lenny** (01:05:09):
Is there a website people can go to learn more about what you're building?

**Julie Zhuo** (01:05:12):
Yes. My product is called Sundial. The website doesn't give you that much. It's fairly high level, but it is sundial.so.

**Lenny** (01:05:18):
Awesome. We're going to link to that in the show notes. Julie, this was such a treat for me. I so appreciate you making time for this. Thank you so much.

**Julie Zhuo** (01:05:25):
This was wonderful. Thank you so much for having me, Lenny.

**Lenny** (01:05:29):
That was awesome. Thank you for listening. If you enjoy the chat, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You could also learn more at lennyspodcast.com. I'll see you in the next episode.

---

## [2/8] April Dunford on product positioning, segmentation, and optimizing your sales process

**Lenny** (00:00:04):
If your product isn't doing well, there's a chance that it may not be the product that's the problem, it may be your positioning. And there's no one I've learned more from about how to very practically and tactically think about your positioning than from April Dunford.

**Lenny** (00:00:17):
April is the best selling author of the book, Obviously Awesome, which many consider an industry bible on product positioning. She's also led teams at seven successful B2B startups, worked with over 200 companies, helping them nail their positioning, and has almost certainly done more positioning work than any human alive.

**Lenny** (00:00:34):
Also, April's guest post in my newsletter, A Quickstart Guide to Positioning is still one of the most popular posts of all time in my newsletter and one I share often with founders. I had a total blast speaking with April, and I hope you learn as much from this conversation as I did.

**Lenny** (00:00:52):
**April Dunford** (00:03:00):
Lenny, you're the legend around here, not me.

**Lenny** (00:03:02):
No, no, no. Let's not-

**April Dunford** (00:03:02):
You're the guy. You're like Madonna. You're just a one-name guy now. You're Lenny, the Lenny.

**Lenny** (00:03:09):
I don't know what to do with that. I'm just going to move on. I appreciate it. Anyway, welcome to the podcast.

**April Dunford** (00:03:17):
So good to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Lenny** (00:03:19):
Of course. I was also going to say that your guest post on positioning on my newsletter is still in the top 20 most popular all-time posts. I keep coming back to it. People keep telling me how useful it is. I keep sending it to founders. And so I'm just excited to dive a lot deeper on this topic.

**April Dunford** (00:03:32):
Cool.

**Lenny** (00:03:33):
All right, let's do it. So for listeners who maybe aren't super familiar with your background and how you came to be such an expert on positioning, could you just briefly share your journey to what you do today?

**April Dunford** (00:03:44):
Yeah, sure. So my background is I didn't study marketing in school, I studied engineering. Straight out of engineering school, I got a job, a product marketing job at a startup. And I've been doing this a long time, so this was back when startups weren't even cool and we just called them small companies.

**April Dunford** (00:04:01):
So I got a job at a little company and then that company, I was assigned to a product that was kind of a loser and we weren't selling very much. We ended up repositioning it and the thing took off, it got hugely successful. That company got acquired, my boss quit and they made me the vice president of marketing. I still have no idea why. And then I decided, well, this is my jam, this is what I do now.

**April Dunford** (00:04:24):
And in particular, we had a handful of products there, the positioning also seemed kind of weak. And so I embarked on this journey of, hey, positioning seems to be really important because when we get it wrong, everything sucks, and when we get it right, we all make all kinds of money, so I should figure out how to do this properly.

**April Dunford** (00:04:43):
And so I read a bunch of books, took a bunch of courses and what I discovered is that positioning is this foundational marketing concept, but we didn't really have a methodology for doing it. And so from that point forward, I became a repeat vice president of marketing at a series of startups. So I think I did seven and six of those got acquired.

**April Dunford** (00:05:04):
So I repositioned a lot of products across that and positioning became my specialty. Basically, if you were looking for a vice president of marketing and I came into the interview, the reason you hired me is because your positioning was crappy and I could talk intelligently about how we were going to fix that.

**April Dunford** (00:05:21):
And then about five, six years ago, I decided I wanted to go do something different and so I made the switch to consulting and now that's all I do. So I basically do positioning. Even more specifically though, I really focused on, I only do tech companies. I only do B2B companies, because my background is all really B2B and I don't really get consumer.

**April Dunford** (00:05:43):
And mainly I work with startups. For the most part it's what I would call a growth stage startup, post series A, series B, but occasionally I do some really, really big companies that have weird positioning stuff going on, like they've acquired a bunch of things and they're trying to turn it into a business unit or something and there's no story around that. So that's how I got here.

**Lenny** (00:06:04):
Awesome. To set a little color, I guess, how many companies have you worked with at this point and helped with positioning?

**April Dunford** (00:06:10):
It's around 200-

**Lenny** (00:06:11):
Wow.

**April Dunford** (00:06:11):
... I think. I think, I suspect that I have done more positioning than anybody on the planet.

**Lenny** (00:06:18):
I was just going to say that.

**April Dunford** (00:06:19):
That's my suspicion. I certainly have positioned more B2B tech companies than anybody. I don't know how anybody's going to get me on that one.

**Lenny** (00:06:27):
I would not be surprised. Okay, so I'm excited to learn a lot from our conversation along those lines. I'm curious, what's the most interesting or unusual company that you've worked with around positioning and what happened there?

**April Dunford** (00:06:39):
The fun part about positioning is that when you do this kind of work, you get to dive into a market that maybe you haven't thought very much about. So it's like, I'm going to drop some names, but this week I'm working with Epic Games on a product that they have called Twinmotion, which is absolutely mind-blowing tech. You should look at it.

**April Dunford** (00:07:01):
I don't come from that world of doing three dimensional graphic stuff, and so it's fun to just do a big, deep dive on that and look at everything in the space and look at what's possible and what isn't possible there.

**April Dunford** (00:07:12):
And so I've done everything from stuff like that to I come from databases. And so I have a lot of companies doing deep data stuff and data analytics stuff, which I find really interesting and cool, but then occasionally you'll get one that makes you think about your life differently.

**April Dunford** (00:07:28):
I did one a year or so ago and the company's called Bluelight Analytics. And what they do is technology for helping certain kinds of dentistry instruments work better. And so I didn't really think much about what happens in the dentist office until I went to do this workshop.

**April Dunford** (00:07:47):
And then we spent the whole time talking about it's terrifying actually, half the stuff that a dentist does in your mouth is very likely to fail because the equipment is terrible and the way they actually do things like cure fillings is actually really terrible. And so sometimes I learn things in these workshops that I wish I didn't know. I'm a little bit scared going to the dentist now.

**Lenny** (00:08:07):
Oh man, sounds like they-

**April Dunford** (00:08:08):
Sorry to the Bluelight guys, but yeah.

**Lenny** (00:08:09):
I thought Bluelight was going to be like not getting exposed to blue light when you're trying to get asleep.

**April Dunford** (00:08:14):
No. No. I wish. That would make me not make me so scared of the dentist.

**Lenny** (00:08:21):
Also a problem. How do you know that you have a positioning problem and that you should focus on positioning?

**April Dunford** (00:08:26):
So this is a thing that people ask me this a lot. And I think what people want, and I want this too, what I wish we had was a metric that I could say, "Hey, when you start seeing this metric go in this direction, then you know the positioning is bad." But unfortunately, weak positioning gets you all the way across the pipeline.

**April Dunford** (00:08:47):
Weak positioning hurts you in the early stages of pipeline in that people don't really get what you are, so they're not responding to your marketing the way they should. And you'll get this sluggishness in the middle of your pipeline, particularly if you have sales people. The light doesn't come on until they've had three calls with the sales rep and then the light comes on.

**April Dunford** (00:09:06):
And then sometimes what you'll get is your sales team is actually really good at selling the stuff, but the positioning's wrong, so you close a lot of deals, but then people get using the product and they're like, "Wait a minute, this isn't the thing that I thought it was or it doesn't do what I expected it to do," and then they churn out on you.

**April Dunford** (00:09:20):
So all your metrics look bad and you can only tell they look bad by comparing them to your own metrics. And so it's really hard to measure if the positioning isn't working or not.

**April Dunford** (00:09:31):
Back when I used to be VP marketing, what I would do to assess this is I'd be the brand new VP of marketing, I'd come on board and I'd say, "Well, I'm just going to go hang out with sales for a bit." And you can really hear it in sales calls, particularly in an initial sales call with a client.

**April Dunford** (00:09:49):
And what you'll hear is things like the customer comes on, your sales rep comes on, and your sales rep's doing a great job pitching the product like, "Oh, we got this thing and it does this, that, and the other thing."

**April Dunford** (00:10:01):
And they'll get a certain way through the pitch and you can see the customer's just like, "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just back it up and pitch it to me again." That's probably the most common one I get is, "Huh? Could you just say that again? Could you just back up to the beginning and do that thing from the beginning?"

**April Dunford** (00:10:15):
So there's this confusion. Sometimes what you'll get is the even worse one is the customer thinks they know exactly what you are, but you ain't that. So you'll get people who say, "Yeah. Yeah. I get it, you're just like Salesforce." And you're like, "Oh actually, no, we're nothing like Salesforce. Sorry. No, that's it. Let me back up and start from the beginning."

**April Dunford** (00:10:34):
Or you'll get this and this one is actually terrible where people will say, "Well, I get it. I mean, I totally get it. I totally get what you do. I just don't get why anyone would pay for that. I can do that in a spreadsheet. I don't get it." So they think they get what you do, but they don't really understand the value.

**April Dunford** (00:10:50):
And so if you start hearing stuff like that in an initial sales call, those are usually good signs that the positioning is weak.

**Lenny** (00:10:58):
That is really helpful. Backing up a little bit, we jumped right in. I'm curious how you even describe positioning, what the heck is positioning? And broadly, just why is it important for people to think about?

**April Dunford** (00:11:08):
In my opinion, it's really misunderstood, which is funny because it's not a new concept. We've been talking about positioning since the '80s, but like a lot of things in marketing people have stretched the definition or there's different definitions, even among marketing people. If I had a dozen vice presidents of marketing together in a room and said, "Hey, define positioning," we'd get a dozen different definitions.

**April Dunford** (00:11:30):
But I think about it this way, positioning defines how your product is the best in the world, delivering some value that a well-defined set of companies care a lot about. So put another way, it encompasses a lot of things, it defines what are the alternatives to what you do? How are you different? What value can you deliver that no other product on the market can?

**April Dunford** (00:11:56):
And oh, by the way, who cares a lot about that value? So who is it that you're trying to target? And then it also encompasses the definition of your market category or what market is it that you intend to win.

**Lenny** (00:12:08):
That is such a succinct, simple way of thinking about it. Something that I've been thinking about is this isn't something just founders should care about. PMs on teams that are building a product should think about this, leaders, GMs of business units. This applies across the board, basically to any product, whether it's the entire company or just one feature.

**April Dunford** (00:12:24):
Well, this is one of the things that where I think people get into weak positioning. One of the things that happens in companies, and I see this a lot where the founder has an idea what the positioning is, but then you go to the marketing department and it's a little bit different, not a lot different, but a little bit different.

**April Dunford** (00:12:42):
And then you sit in on the sales pitch and that's a little bit different again. And then you walk over to the product team and they're thinking about it slightly differently. So I think a lot of weak positioning comes from the fact that we don't have perfect alignment across the team on all these piece parts of positioning.

**April Dunford** (00:13:00):
So in the work I do, and even back when I was a VP marketing, if we're going to fix this thing, we can't just have the marketing department or just the product managers sit down and cook up new positioning and then heave it over the wall to everybody else, it actually needs to be a group effort. It's a team sport.

**April Dunford** (00:13:19):
So if we're going to do positioning well and then actually have that positioning stick and get adopted the way we want it to across the company, if we're going to do a positioning exercise, ideally we've got marketing, product, sales, customer success, and anybody else we need from the executive team, particularly the CEO, together in a room when we're building it.

**April Dunford** (00:13:41):
So that we can all bring our expertise to the table, bring our understanding of what customers do and our product to the table, thrash around on it a little bit until we get agreement on it. And then now that we've all got agreement and alignment around it, then we can all go execute on it and we're all singing the same song.

**Lenny** (00:13:59):
That's so interesting. How often do you find that the problem is misalignment within the company versus just they don't actually have the right positioning and that's the problem?

**April Dunford** (00:14:07):
Well, a lot of times it's misalignment. I would say the majority of the time it's misalignment, because what it is a piece of the company has it right, but the other pieces don't. So I get one of two things are happening.

**April Dunford** (00:14:21):
So sometimes what I'll get is the founder comes to me and the founder says, "I know exactly how to tell this story. You put me in front of a customer, I crush it every time. I know how to position this thing. I know how to do whatever. But we've gotten big now and I got a brand new VP marketing and I got a brand new VP sales and I just hired somebody to do product and they don't understand it the way I understand it."

**April Dunford** (00:14:43):
"And when I listen in on a sales call, what I hear is all wrong, that it's not it. When I look at our marketing, what I see, that's not it. And I've tried to get everybody in alignment and I can't. And so I need you to come in here and facilitate a thing where we can all get in alignment." That happens a lot.

**April Dunford** (00:14:58):
The other one I get is kind of the opposite of that, where you've got a founder that used to run sales, used to do all the deals, used to do everything, had their arms around this market very tight at one point and then the company's grown, often very quickly. They've hired a bunch of very senior people to run pieces, but at the same time, the market itself has shifted a lot.

**April Dunford** (00:15:20):
And so I'll get approached then often by the head of product or the head of marketing that comes in and says, "I don't think we have this right. I think we're actually positioned for what the market used to be. And I'm having a hard time getting the founder, having their heads around it and everybody else on the team, because we're all coming at it with different information."

**April Dunford** (00:15:41):
And so sales sees what's happening in sales. Marketing sees what's happening in marketing. The founder's getting pulled into certain deals, but not all the deals. Product's seeing what's happening in the thing. And so again, there's pieces of it there, but we're not all in alignment and agreement. And so we got to get everybody together and then work through it.

**Lenny** (00:15:59):
What does it look like when you've nailed it, when you are maybe in a good place with positioning? And also just along those-

**April Dunford** (00:16:05):
Yeah-

**Lenny** (00:16:05):
Go for it. Go for it.

**April Dunford** (00:16:06):
... it's interesting because when it's working really well, it feels like magic and really great positioning feels obvious. You pitch it to people and they're like, "Well, of course that's it. What else could it be?"

**April Dunford** (00:16:22):
One of my favorite companies, this is a company I worked with a little bit a couple of years ago is Postman. You know these folks?

**Lenny** (00:16:28):
Mm-hmm.

**April Dunford** (00:16:28):
So they basically have an API platform, a platform for building and using APIs. And just how I described that right there is so simple, it's so simple, of course that's what it is. But it was not simple getting there and that's not the way they were always describing themselves. And if you run that back three years ago, that's not at all what you would have gotten as the pitch for Postman.

**April Dunford** (00:16:51):
But really, really great positioning just feels like it's so clear, it's so simple, of course that's what it is, of course, and of course we need one of those. If we're serious about APIs, why would we not have a platform for building and managing APIs? Of course we need that. And so it's hard to judge sometimes from the outside.

**April Dunford** (00:17:11):
The other thing is that positioning is somewhat like messaging in some ways in that it's not a static thing, it changes over time. Your product itself doesn't stay the same, the market doesn't stay the same, and so things will shift over time. And so you can have good positioning that suddenly becomes bad positioning and it's not great positioning anymore, or good positioning that goes sideways or whatever, then you got to come back.

**April Dunford** (00:17:36):
And so usually I think there's value in checking in on your positioning because it's really hard. Again, I don't have a measurement to say yes or no, the positioning's working. And so I think there's no harm in checking in on it, going through a process to walk through it and just check in and see, could it be better? Maybe we could tighten this up. Maybe this could be a lot better than it is right now, but we've never sat down and actually deliberately looked at it.

**Lenny** (00:18:03):
Just to make it even a little more concrete, what are just some examples of good positioning statements or just the positioned companies?

**April Dunford** (00:18:11):
So one thing is a lot of times people will send me a link to their homepage and they'll say, "What do you think? Is this positioning good or not?" And the problem with B2B tech companies is, well, unless I'm your buyer, I'm not the right person to ask.

**April Dunford** (00:18:26):
So you can have companies, people will say, "Well, I looked at the website and who knows what that is?" And it's like, well, it doesn't matter if I can understand what it is or not. If I'm selling a deeply technical thing to deeply technical buyers, it's okay if your grandmother doesn't understand what it is when they get there. What matters is, does it resonate for your buyers? And when they land there, do they go, "Oh yeah, I get what this is, and that seems like a thing I should have."

**April Dunford** (00:18:53):
And so a lot of the companies that I really love the positioning of, you would go and look at it and say, "I don't know, man, I'm not even sure I really understand what that is." If you didn't have anything to do with APIs and you didn't know what the fuck an API was, whatever, you might land on Postman's page and go, "I honestly don't get that." But that's okay, you're not a person building the APIs, so you don't have to understand it. That's all right.

**April Dunford** (00:19:18):
Particularly, I've worked a lot with companies doing deep AI stuff, deep, deep digital analytics and deep data stuff and you can't tell from looking at the website, whether it's working or not. The true test of whether the positioning's working or not is, if I'm sitting across from a qualified prospect and I tell the story, does the prospect get excited and want to buy something? That's the real test of it.

**April Dunford** (00:19:41):
Any other test I think is we're bringing our own baggage into it and saying ... I pick on these guys a little bit, but in Canada, there's a big startup conference, it's great, it's called Startupfest. It's in Montreal.

**Lenny** (00:19:51):
I've been to that.

**April Dunford** (00:19:52):
But every year they have this thing and it's called Pitch the Grannies. And you go in and you're a startup and you pitch the grandmothers and the grandmothers decide whether or not your pitch was any good. And this infuriates me because I'm like, "This is a terrible judge of pitching." Maybe if we're doing the VC pitch, in which case you're saying the VCs and the grandmothers are exactly the same, that's a little insulting.

**April Dunford** (00:20:16):
But certainly, if the pitch is a customer facing pitch, I don't care whether the grandmother understands it or not. Unless I happen to be building the thing for grandmas, I really don't think that matters at all, so yeah.

**Lenny** (00:20:28):
Hopefully no B2B startups are pitching to grandmas, don't think that would go well.

**April Dunford** (00:20:32):
Yeah.

**Lenny** (00:20:32):
Okay, so say that you're a PM or a founder that's ready to start figuring out their positioning for their product, what's the first thing that you do?

**April Dunford** (00:20:41):
So I've done a lot of thinking about how should we actually do positioning. And so a critical piece of positioning is your differentiated value, what's the value that you can deliver that no other company can deliver?

**April Dunford** (00:20:56):
And so how companies get this wrong a lot is they'll say, "Okay, well, we want to look at our positioning, so let's get everybody together." Or sometimes they'll say, "Let's just sit in the marketing department and think about the value."

**April Dunford** (00:21:07):
But sometimes folks will get a team together, they get a team together and then they'll say, "Okay, so why does everybody love our stuff?" And this is a terrible way to go about it because what you'll get is just a bunch of opinions and we don't really know how to measure is that good or not.

**April Dunford** (00:21:20):
So I actually think the first step in a good positioning exercise is to really understand, what do we have to position against? So put another way, it's like saying, what do I have to beat in order to win a deal? So in positioning work we call this competitive alternatives.

**April Dunford** (00:21:36):
Now how people mess up this first step is I say competitive alternatives and they think competition, so things that look exactly like me. But in B2B, we have two sets of competitors. We have status quo, which is whatever the company is doing to attempt to solve the problem right now, even if it's crappy and not great.

**April Dunford** (00:21:56):
And then there's if the company does decide they're going to buy something different, they usually make a short list, so it's whoever else lands on the short list. So I need to be able to put a stake in the ground and say, "I got to beat all that in order to win a deal."

**April Dunford** (00:22:10):
Now, most folks will discount the status quo, but they shouldn't because in B2B we lose about 40% of our deals to quote-unquote, "no decision," which actually means we lost to the spreadsheet, we lost to pen and paper, we lost to interns. And if we're not positioning well against that, we're never going to get the customer to come off of that.

**April Dunford** (00:22:31):
So I got to win against status quo, but I also have to win, if it's ... Most of the time, if it's B2B, you don't just buy the first thing you come across, you make a short list of alternatives and I got to win against those as well.

**April Dunford** (00:22:44):
So step number one, what am I positioning against? Once I have that stake in the ground, then I can start thinking about what makes us different. So the easiest way to do this is okay, this is what I have to position against, what have I got capabilities wise that the alternatives don't have?

**April Dunford** (00:23:01):
So feature, function, or even capabilities of the company, which could be pricing or professional services or other things that you've got, but also capabilities of the product. What have I got that the alternatives don't have? And I can make a giant list of these things.

**April Dunford** (00:23:15):
And then I can translate that stuff into value by going down the list and saying, "Okay, we have this great feature, so what? Why does a customer care about it? What is the value that feature enables?" And when I do that mapping over to value, what generally happens is I end up with two or three value buckets or value themes.

**April Dunford** (00:23:36):
And quite often those value buckets or value themes are different than what I would've gotten, if I got all the smart people in my company together and said, "Hey, why does everybody love our stuff?" When I do it this way, I'm ensured that those value themes are differentiated and not just things that are generally valuable, but any alternative could get it done, so why are we even talking about it? So in my mind, that's how we do it.

**April Dunford** (00:24:00):
Once I've got differentiated value, then I can start thinking about, well, look, I could sell this product to any company that has this problem, but not everybody cares about this value the same way. And so what are the characteristics of a target account that make them really, really care a lot about that value? If I do some deep thinking about that, that's going to be my definition of a really best fit customer.

**April Dunford** (00:24:22):
And then the last piece of positioning of course, is market category. And so again, a lot of people will just start with market category and then try to back up, which I think is crazy, because then we don't have any way to judge the goodness of a market category.

**April Dunford** (00:24:35):
But if I've got, look, this is the value only I can deliver, these are the kind of people that really care a lot about that value, if I start thinking about positioning as the context I position my product in, then the best market category is the context I position my product in such that this value is obvious to these people.

**April Dunford** (00:24:57):
This is my long-winded way of doing it, but this is the only way I know how to get positioning done.

**Lenny** (00:25:02):
So you just basically went through the steps and the bullet points of things you've got to figure out your position. Could you just briefly summarize that just for people to have that in their brain?

**April Dunford** (00:25:10):
Yeah. So it works like this. I start with competitive alternatives. What do I got to beat in order to win a deal, status quo, things on the short list. Once I've got that, then I can make a list of differentiated capabilities, what capabilities do I have that the alternatives do not? I can then translate those capabilities into value, the so what for the customer. And while I'm doing that, these things will theme out. So I'll end up with two, three value themes, value buckets.

**April Dunford** (00:25:37):
Once I have that, then I can ask myself the question, well, okay, what are the characteristics of a target account that make them care a lot about that value? So that next piece is best fit customers or target customers, who am I going after for this thing? And then the last bit's market category, so what's the context I position this thing in that makes my value obvious to the people I'm going after?

**Lenny** (00:25:59):
Super helpful. What if we pick a company either that you worked with or that's just out there and think through what they would do for each of these steps to make this super real?

**April Dunford** (00:26:09):
Sure. I'm going to do Help Scout because I like these guys.

**Lenny** (00:26:11):
Sounds good.

**April Dunford** (00:26:12):
And I was just talking to the CEO not too long ago. So Help Scout's a good example in that they're a startup. I would call them a growth stage startup. They're not super big, but they're not teeny-weeny either. And they're in what would appear to be a terrible market, which is they sell software for customer success. So their competitor's like Zendesk. There's actually a million companies in this space, but the gorilla in the market is Zendesk.

**April Dunford** (00:26:39):
And so if I put the stake in the ground and say, "Well, what do I got to replace?" Well, their customer's a lot of small, medium businesses, a lot of direct to consumer E-commerce businesses. And so they obviously have to beat Zendesk and the other folks that are out there, but sometimes they're replacing just email or even a rudimentary shared inbox. That's who they got to beat.

**April Dunford** (00:27:04):
And so when you look through what Help Scout has that's differentiating, they've got a whole bunch of features that are really around delivering really amazing service to the customer. So they do a shared inbox. They were the first ones to do a proper services-oriented shared inbox to make sure that nobody gets missed and the right people get assigned to the right thing and you don't get conflicts.

**April Dunford** (00:27:27):
But they do a lot of other things like their whole philosophy about how they treat a customer in the service process is really different from Zendesk. So you get assigned a ticket number, you get assigned a person and things like that. And so they do all the neat, integrated things like they'll do a chat bot thing, but it only appears when there's an actual person to chat with you. They don't try to pretend they're a machine, things like that. So they want to guarantee a really high level of service.

**April Dunford** (00:27:52):
So when you map that to value, the value is one, I'm delivering this extra amazing service for customers. I'm not trying to push customers to a low cost channel. I'm treating them like a person. So their value is really around delivering amazing customer service that's going to deepen your relationship with the customer. That's the value.

**April Dunford** (00:28:15):
And then you say, "Well, who cares a lot about that?" Well, not everybody. So there are businesses out there, I would argue maybe your phone company doesn't really care. They have a giant call center and all they care about is reducing the cost in their call center and driving you to low cost channels.

**April Dunford** (00:28:33):
They don't actually see customer service as a way to build a relationship with you versus a lot of direct to consumer brands or E-commerce brands. This is almost the only way that they can interact with their customer. So they actually see customer service as a way to really drive growth through customer loyalty. And so those are the kind of companies that are a really good fit for Help Scout.

**April Dunford** (00:28:57):
So I go through that process, that's my positioning. Then the next thing you got to do is okay, now that I understand all that, how do I weave a story around that? So how do I tell the story about that, if a customer comes to me? And so what we want to do with our positioning is turn it into a sales narrative that clicks with the kind of customers we know we can sell to.

**April Dunford** (00:29:19):
So the way Help Scout delivers the story, if you come in, you're a qualified prospect, it starts with this idea that customer success is a growth driver. Modern E-commerce companies see customer success as a way to deepen customer relationships, increase repeat buying, show it as a growth driver. And they have a bunch of great stats that prove that this is true.

**April Dunford** (00:29:40):
And then they go look at all your other alternatives. All your other alternatives treat your people like a number. They give them a number. They try to drive them to low cost channels. They try to do these things. They are not treating this like a growth driver, they're treating it like a cost center.

**April Dunford** (00:29:57):
And so being able to tell that story that takes your differentiated value and puts it into context is the way all this stuff comes together and the rubber meets the road. So I don't know if that's a good example.

**Lenny** (00:30:07):
Oh, that's an amazing example. That makes it so real. Is the output of this process a doc with these bullet points, plus this story that you train sales on? Or how does that look?

**April Dunford** (00:30:18):
Yeah. So we do two things in the workshops that I do. So first we get the gang together. So I want representation from sales, marketing, product, customer success, CEO, everybody in the room together. And then we're going to work through the five piece parts.

**April Dunford** (00:30:33):
So once we've got, here's what we compete with, here's how we're different, this is the value we can deliver no one else can, these are the kind of people that really love our stuff, so here's who we're going after, this is the market we're going to win, then we can document that in a document.

**April Dunford** (00:30:46):
And for the marketing people, that's a good starting place to then go and build messaging because we've got an idea what our value props are. But if we end there and we just stop there, then what usually happens is the rest of the team goes back to normal and they go, "Yeah, we did this thing." And conceptually they get it, but they don't know how to tell a story. It's super important in sales because if sales can't tell the story, they can't pitch it, if they can't pitch it, they're going to make shit up.

**April Dunford** (00:31:12):
And so what we want to do then is, okay, we've got this positioning, now let's put it together into a sales narrative that we can then take and test with qualified prospects and make sure it works, but we've also got something that the sales team can pitch and oh, by the way, everybody else knows how to tell the story too. So product knows how to tell the story, customer success knows how to tell the story, CEO knows how to tell the story.

**April Dunford** (00:31:35):
So the last thing we do is we map this positioning to a sales narrative. So what we do in the workshop is we storyboard it out. And then after the workshop is done, the team's going, usually it's marketing and sales together, they take that storyboard and then turn it into an actual pitch, which is like a deck, a demo, a script. And then they can use that to test the positioning as well.

**Lenny** (00:31:57):
**April Dunford** (00:33:08):
Well, what you want to do is you want to take a customer's viewpoint on this, right? So let's think about how customers buy. We don't talk about this a lot, but let's think about how customers buy. Typical B2B buying process, this is what it looks like.

**April Dunford** (00:33:22):
Somebody, VP sales wakes up in the morning and says, "You know what sucks? The way we track our pipeline sucks. It's stupid. I can't deal with this anymore. We need to get a tool in here. We should have a CRM, man." And they go to the office and they don't actually go look for the new tool. They find some sucker in the office like John, you, get out there, manager of sales ops or whatever, find us a CRM.

**April Dunford** (00:33:45):
And John's panicked. John's like, "Oh my God, you're kidding me." Maybe John's used some CRMs, but he's not an expert on the CRM market. He doesn't know what's possible and what isn't possible. So John's like, "Oh God, I don't even know." And then he Googles and what does he get? A fire hose of information.

**April Dunford** (00:34:04):
He goes on a G2 Crowd and Software Advice and all these places. There's 9,000 companies listed, they're all in the top ranked quadrant. There's like a thousand of them. Some of them are for big companies. Some of them are small companies. I have no idea how to make a short list, freaking out.

**April Dunford** (00:34:17):
And so somehow they figure out how to make a short list and that person has got to justify this choice to their boss, so there better be something there. I'm not allowed to just throw the dart at it. I'm not allowed to just go back to my VP and say, "I just like the rep better, man. They're all the same. I picked this one by spinning the wheel." No, you got to go back and tell your boss why you made a smart choice.

**April Dunford** (00:34:43):
And so we have to be able to give customers that when they get on the sales call with us. The best thing we could do is say, "Look, buddy, there's lots of CRMs out there, and let me tell you how this market shakes out. These ones are really good for big enterprises. These ones are really good, if you got this. These ones are really good, if you got this. But look, if you're this, this and this, you really need these four things and we got that and that's why you should pick us."

**April Dunford** (00:35:08):
Because we need to make that customer feel comfortable they've made a good decision. Otherwise, what happens? No decision, that's what happens. If they can't figure that out, they go back to the boss and say, "You know what? All the CRMs are shit. We should just keep using the spreadsheet. It's fine. Let's just allay this." And 40% of the time that's what happened.

**April Dunford** (00:35:26):
So if you can't help the customer figure out how to justify this decision and make this decision and basically come back and say, "I decided this was the right approach to the problem and I picked this one for this reason," then you're not going to get the deal and nobody's going to get the deal.

**Lenny** (00:35:41):
And in your experience, the fact that here's why it's different from maybe the incumbents or other options ends up being really important? Basically, it's really hard to win by just saying we're better, say better than Slack or better than Zoom. It needs to be-

**April Dunford** (00:35:58):
But better how? You got to be able to articulate better. So sometimes it's like they have more bells and whistles, but we're simpler and you don't actually need all those bells and whistles. So we're better because we're easier at it, less training, easier to get stood up, whatever.

**April Dunford** (00:36:10):
Or you might say the opposite of that, we have all the bells and whistles. It's super customizable. You could do whatever you want. Those other things are Mickey Mouse play things. You're a big mature company, you need all the bells and whistles. We're better.

**Lenny** (00:36:21):
Great.

**April Dunford** (00:36:22):
And so that better has two pieces to it, what's the value and who cares about that value? Because better means something different to different segments in the market. So better for a small company is not the same thing as better for a large enterprise.

**April Dunford** (00:36:36):
Your trick in the positioning is to be able to articulate, why are we the best kind of solution for this particular type of customer? That's it. And if you could nail that, then you sell lots of stuff, you beat the other guys, you win deals all the time.

**Lenny** (00:36:51):
I love that. That's going to be our soundbite from this episode maybe.

**April Dunford** (00:36:54):
Oh great.

**Lenny** (00:36:55):
There it is. I want to go back to the messaging versus positioning. What's the difference between those two concepts?

**April Dunford** (00:37:02):
So they get confused a lot and a lot of people will say, "Well, I don't like our messaging. So can you come in and help do messaging?" I think they're really distinct because I see positioning as a fundamental input to messaging.

**April Dunford** (00:37:18):
Most of the time when people say messaging, what they mean is this is the text on the homepage, which is really different from what is my definition of competitive alternative? How do we win in the market? Where do we win in the market? So positioning's all about defining that and then things flow out of that. So I can't write the messaging until I understand, well, who's the message for, and what's our value against who? And so once I understand all of that, then I can understand how to write messaging.

**April Dunford** (00:37:46):
A lot of people get confused between positioning and branding as well. And folks will sometimes use those words interchangeably or they'll talk about brand positioning, which really bugs me. I mean, there's positioning and there's branding, those two things are different.

**April Dunford** (00:38:00):
But if I was going to work on branding, again, I can't figure out what I want the brand to stand for until I understand, well, who's my target buyer and what's my differentiation from the other alternatives in the market because I want that brand to be distinct.

**April Dunford** (00:38:17):
So I need to have positioning figured out first and then practically everything I do in marketing and sales flows downstream from that.

**Lenny** (00:38:24):
Are there any companies out there that you think need help with their positioning that maybe have an opportunity to work with someone like you?

**April Dunford** (00:38:32):
There's some companies that I think you can tell they've not really thought about it. And a lot of times you'll see it in companies where they're brand new and the tech is really spectacular, but you can tell they haven't quite figured out well, so what?

**April Dunford** (00:38:49):
So when Magic Leap first launched that stuff was so mind blowing and it was like, oh my gosh, and all their demonstrations, the thing with the elephant and the guy's hand and all that stuff, and you're like, "Wow, that's amazing."

**April Dunford** (00:39:04):
And I read this really in depth interview with the founder and he was talking about the tech and this guy's view on the market, it was so interesting, but it was like, so what? What am I actually going to do with that? Who's your target market for this? What is the value of this? We all get it's cool, but what is the actual value of this?

**April Dunford** (00:39:26):
And you can see now, which I don't know if people know this, but if you go to the Magic Leap site, and I do because I'm interested in Magic Leap because I've been following their story since the beginning, but they've now gotten much tighter on their positioning.

**April Dunford** (00:39:42):
And they're actually selling B2B now, into manufacturing and they're talking about wide frame of view and all this stuff you can do, that's really differentiated than you could with other types of traditional VR things. And so if you look at their positioning, now, it's getting much, much tighter, but at the beginning it was like, what?

**April Dunford** (00:39:58):
And I felt the same thing about Google Glass, when it first came out. It was like, I get why people get excited about it, I just don't get why anybody would buy. I get what it is, but why do we need one of those? I don't see the value in this thing at all.

**April Dunford** (00:40:11):
And then again, if you see the applications for Google Glass now, there's a lot of very specific B2B use cases that they're now doubling down on. And they're coming back to the consumer use case a little bit now for some augmented reality stuff that actually sounds like it's useful. But a lot of times what we'll get is the initial launch of something will be this gee-whiz, it's so amazing.

**April Dunford** (00:40:34):
The archetype of this is the launch of the Segway. So there's been a couple of books written about it, but it's fascinating. The original founder of the Segway was the Elon Musk of his day. He had done three or four other companies, they were all wildly successful. When he got the idea for the Segway, he literally lifted his little pinky and raised a hundred million from Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and a who's who of Silicon Valley venture.

**April Dunford** (00:40:59):
And then he kept positioning the thing as a revolution in human transport, but he didn't want to let the cat out of the bag, what it was, so he just kept saying that. And he was in the news all over and he's like, "Revolution in human transport." And people were getting so excited because they were like, "What's a revolution in human transport? It's a flying car, man. We're finally getting flying cars."

**April Dunford** (00:41:18):
So everybody's studying his patent filings and all this stuff, and they were like, "Oh my God, we're getting flying cars. It's going to be amazing." And there was such hype around this thing when they launched it that he actually got invited to Good Morning America.

**Lenny** (00:41:31):
I was watching that. I was watching that live [inaudible 00:41:33]-

**April Dunford** (00:41:33):
Yeah, to come on Good Morning America, do the thing and everyone's like, "Oh my God, we're getting flying cars." And then he comes out on the Segway and everyone's like, "What the fuck? That's not what we were promised, man."

**April Dunford** (00:41:45):
And the interesting thing about this Segway was that refusal to position it at a micro level, left it up to the customers to decide what it was. So even when we saw it was like, "Okay, so it's human transport. We get that, but what should I compare it to? Should I compare it to a car or a bicycle?"

**April Dunford** (00:42:05):
And so a lot of the early users were saying it was the worst thing to have a Segway because nobody knew where you were supposed to drive it because they didn't know what it was. So if you were driving on the road, cars were honking at you and they're like, "Get that stupid thing off the road." But if you drive it on the sidewalk, then the ladies with the baby strollers are like, "Get that stupid thing off the sidewalk."

**April Dunford** (00:42:26):
And the thing was a colossal failure eventually. The patents are still amazing. The patents just got sold last year or the year before to some company that does these hoverboard things. But the tech was way, way ahead of its time, but there wasn't good positioning to answer the question, who's this for? Why do they care? So what?

**Lenny** (00:42:46):
That's a really good segue to a question I wanted to ask you is when-

**April Dunford** (00:42:48):
Segue, ooh.

**Lenny** (00:42:49):
Wow. Unintentionally intended. When does it make sense for a company to bring in someone like you to go deep on positioning?

**April Dunford** (00:42:59):
I think most companies can do positioning on their own. That's my belief. Some companies I think lack a methodology to follow to go do it. So I wrote a book called Obviously Awesome, and that was the purpose of that book. If you want to do positioning and you just want to start a little exercise and do it yourself in house, you can use my methodology and my way to do it. And I think most companies can get it done that way.

**April Dunford** (00:43:24):
But most of the ones that come to me have attempted to do that and it hasn't worked out for one reason or another. So sometimes it's because, and this is not unusual in startups, we got an executive team full of A type people and we're all pretty opinionated and we just can't get to agreement on stuff. And it makes a lot of sense to bring an outside person in to help facilitate that conversation, particularly one that's got a lot of experience in positioning.

**April Dunford** (00:43:49):
So sometimes I get brought in for that reason. Other times I get brought in as companies just feel like they really got to nail it because there's a lot at stake. I've done a lot of work with companies that they're about to hire 10, 15 people in sales or they're about to make a really big investment in marketing and they just want to make sure they really nail it and not have to maybe do a not so great version and then redo it and then redo it again. If you bring me in, then we're going to nail it. There's no way we're going to get to something that isn't good.

**April Dunford** (00:44:17):
So sometimes people bring me in because they feel like there's a lot at stake. And those are generally the companies that bring me in. Some bigger companies I think bring me in, again, a bit more of a security blanket. We know we could do it ourselves, we kind of got it ourselves, but we'd feel better if we had the expert in here just to make sure we nail it once and we don't have to come back and do this again right away.

**April Dunford** (00:44:39):
So those are the kind of companies typically I work with, but I think a lot of companies could get it done with my book or some methodology, get the gang together and just bang it out themselves. I think everybody should start there.

**Lenny** (00:44:50):
That's awesome. How long should it take to do this kind of process either on their own and then with you? How long do these things take?

**April Dunford** (00:44:57):
Well, so the work that I do, we do it as a week long sprint. Now there's a bunch of prep that happens before that and there's some stuff we do afterwards, but the actual exercise itself is a series of sessions spread out over a week. I've seen companies do it on their own and they do it in a couple of days. They trap everybody in a room over a couple of days.

**April Dunford** (00:45:17):
Assuming you've got the right information to go and start with it, it shouldn't take you too long. And it really depends on how contentious things are because again, what you're trying to get to is agreement and alignment across the team. You're not done until everybody thinks what we've come up with is good.

**Lenny** (00:45:33):
So it sounds like you work mostly with larger companies and later stage companies. I mentioned this to you before we-

**April Dunford** (00:45:39):
Yes and no.

**Lenny** (00:45:39):
Okay. Okay.

**April Dunford** (00:45:40):
Yes and no. It depends on how you define that really. I've done a lot of companies that are around 5 million revenue, 10 million revenue in there. So they're beyond seed stage, but I wouldn't call them a large company quite yet.

**April Dunford** (00:45:55):
But I will say this, I do get a lot of calls from companies that are super early stage and where I don't think they're ready to actually really ... Well, they're not ready to bring in someone like me, and I think in general, they're not ready to really over tighten their positioning.

**April Dunford** (00:46:12):
So I think about it this way. So I've got this new thing, I'm either about to launch it into market or I've got it in market, I've got a handful of customers. At that stage, what I think you've got is a positioning thesis. And so the best thing you could do is deliberately go through a positioning exercise, document the thesis.

**April Dunford** (00:46:30):
And so the thesis says, we think we compete with these folks. We think this is differentiating. This is the value we think we can deliver that no one else can. These are the people we think are going to get really excited about that. Therefore, this is the market we're going to win. But it's just a thesis.

**April Dunford** (00:46:43):
And so internally it's good for us all to be in alignment internally, but when I go to launch that externally, if I don't have any customers yet, it's very likely, and in my experience, 100% of the time, the thesis is partially incorrect. It's based on a bunch of assumptions and our best guess at it, based on what we did in customer discovery or all our research we did before we built the thing.

**April Dunford** (00:47:05):
But we always, we're never a hundred percent correct. And so in these cases, I actually think it's better in the early days of a product to keep the positioning a little bit loose and allow the market to pull you maybe in a direction that you didn't think it was going to.

**April Dunford** (00:47:23):
So here's my terrible analogy I use all the time, but I'm going to use it here. But it's like I designed a fishing net and my thesis is this thing's amazing for tuna. It's a tuna fishing net. It's the world's greatest tuna fishing net.

**April Dunford** (00:47:35):
So I could launch that and say, "It's just for tuna, only tuna. Don't use it if it's not tuna." And maybe it works for tuna, maybe it doesn't and I don't really know. And if it fails, it fails hard.

**April Dunford** (00:47:47):
A better way I think is we know internally that it's the tuna fishing net. That's why we built it. That's what it is, but let's just at the beginning, let's put it out there and keep it a little loose and we say, "It's a net for fish, big fish, all kinds of big fish, any kind of big fish. And then let's just see, let's let the fishermen try it out. Let's see what they pull up."

**April Dunford** (00:48:06):
And maybe what we discover is, you know what? This thing's actually amazing for grouper and we just didn't know, because we're not grouper people. We didn't really think about grouper. And then once we've got enough of that signal and we start seeing the pattern in who loves our stuff and why, then we can really tighten it up and run at that market.

**April Dunford** (00:48:22):
But at the beginning, I think it's actually okay if your positioning's a little bit loose. And so I think you can worry too much about positioning in the super early days of a product when it's impossible to tighten it up, because you just don't have the data to do it.

**Lenny** (00:48:35):
I know that you touched on this a bit, but what does that transition look like between, okay, it's okay to keep it loose and see where the market pulls to, okay, we got to start taking this seriously? Is there a trigger that's like, okay, let's get into this?

**April Dunford** (00:48:47):
Yeah. It's one of those things that usually like you know when you know. But what you want is you want to start feeling comfortable that there's a pattern and it isn't just like, hey, I got one customer in this segment and one customer in this segment and one customer in this segment and I don't really know.

**April Dunford** (00:49:06):
What it usually starts at the beginning is it starts with, you'll say, "Gosh, all kinds of people like our stuff. All kinds of people like our stuff for all kinds of different reasons." And if you're seeing that you don't see the pattern yet.

**April Dunford** (00:49:19):
And eventually what happens is the pattern starts becoming clear that it's like, oh, all those customers look differently but there's actually this thread through them. Look, they all have the same marketing automation tool. Isn't that interesting? Or they all have the same number of sales people on their team. Isn't that interesting? I've done enough of these pitches now to know if you've got this, this, and this, this pitch is going to go good, and if you don't, it is not going to go good.

**April Dunford** (00:49:47):
So once you start feeling like I got the pattern here, it's starting to come into focus, then I think you're ready to really tighten things up, smash your foot on the gas and say, "We're just going to run at that because we know we can sell here. We know we win pretty much every time when we meet these conditions. Let's go do that."

**Lenny** (00:50:06):
I'm really glad we touched on this topic. I mentioned to you earlier that I was at a meetup last night and I was talking about this podcast that I'm starting and I asked who they'd love to hear on this podcast, and your name was the first name this guy brought up. And so-

**April Dunford** (00:50:19):
That's awesome.

**Lenny** (00:50:19):
... he's a huge fanboy. And I asked him what question he would ask you.

**April Dunford** (00:50:22):
I have fans. That's so cool.

**Lenny** (00:50:26):
You're out there. You're out there at meetups. And this is what he wanted to know actually is around just how do you think about this for startups and early stage stuff. So I'm glad we touched on it.

**April Dunford** (00:50:32):
Yeah.

**Lenny** (00:50:33):
The last topic I want to make sure we chat about, and this is what led to our conversation, we had a Twitter exchange about this was around segmentation versus personas and just how people confuse these things and how to think about these topics. And so I guess I'd love to get your take on just what's the difference between say segmentation and personas.

**April Dunford** (00:50:51):
Right. So you know how I said earlier marketers, we're really bad with definitions on things? And so everything in marketing is poorly defined and the marketers are always fighting over what do we mean when we say brand and things like this? So personas and segments, oh my gosh, terrible.

**April Dunford** (00:51:10):
So now this I think stems from if you go to marketing school, a lot of what you learn in marketing school is very consumer oriented, like consumer product oriented. And so if you're selling to consumers, a lot of the ways a consumer market gets segmented ... So segmentation is the way you split up a market.

**April Dunford** (00:51:29):
So the way you would segment a consumer market is you might say, "Well, I've got this toothpaste. And this toothpaste is for men under the age of 16 that want to get a date or something like that." And that would be how you would segment the market, which coincidentally sounds a lot like a persona.

**April Dunford** (00:51:51):
So personas are about people and it's characteristics of a particular buyer, a particular type of buyer. And so we'll do personas to try to get really deep understanding of, who is this buyer? What are they care about? What are their hopes and dreams? What makes them scared? What makes them excited? What are they trying to get done? This kind of stuff.

**April Dunford** (00:52:10):
Now we go to B2B and that's not how we segment a market. We're not talking about 25 year old down to the age of whatever, whatever. We're segmenting the market on different things. And in fact, in B2B, we can segment a market on almost anything, but typically there would be what we call firmographics, like how big's the company? How many employees? How much revenue? What geography is it in? But then we often do segmentations on things that are nothing to do with that.

**April Dunford** (00:52:35):
So if we really want to target a set of customers, often we'll say, "You know what? My product is really good for folks that have a creative team with more than three people and a budget of this and they use this particular software package." We win all day, if we have that.

**April Dunford** (00:52:56):
And that's a very actionable segmentation, I can go find companies that have that, I can make a list of companies that have that. And that's who my marketing and sales is going to go after. If sales needs to make a list of companies to go chase, that's that. And so in my mind, this is super important.

**April Dunford** (00:53:13):
Coming back to the previous question, when we were talking about, I'm starting to see the patterns in who loves my stuff and why, I'm not talking about the person there, I'm talking about the kind of company. What is common amongst the companies that love us, that I can segment the market and say, "Look, if your company is this size, you have this software package, you have this and this," I'm going to win all day.

**April Dunford** (00:53:35):
And so I need to understand that deeply in order to build my whole go-to market strategy, in order to have marketing campaigns that resonate with those kinds of companies, in order to make a list, if my sales are doing outbound, or if I'm doing target account selling, or ABM, how do I make that list of who I'm going after, that kind of stuff.

**April Dunford** (00:53:53):
Then we have personas. Now again, if I'm selling a consumer thing, maybe all I care about is personas, all I care about is who's this person who's the buyer. B2B, everything's a little bit more complicated than that. So in a typical B2B purchase process, particularly if it's what we would call enterprise software, even if it's not very expensive enterprise software, typically we have between five and seven people are involved in what we call making the decision for what gets bought.

**April Dunford** (00:54:24):
So if I come back to my example earlier where the VP sales decides they need a CRM and they pick on poor John, and then John's got to go figure it out. John, that persona, let's say he's the sales ops manager, we would make a sales ops manager persona that would capture that person, but there's other people involved in this deal.

**April Dunford** (00:54:44):
So as part of figuring out which CRM to buy, when he got in the later stages of the deal, he probably consults some of the sales reps, because they're going to be the end users of this thing, and so he doesn't want to pick something that they're all going to hate.

**April Dunford** (00:54:56):
He's probably got an IT department and IT probably gets to say about, well, does it meet our security and compliance stuff? And we're going to have to take care of it. Does it integrate with what we need to integrate with? Can it suck in data or push out data to our data warehouse or whatever? So that person has a say.

**April Dunford** (00:55:14):
There might be a purchasing department. There might be legal involved. There might be head of security involved. There might be chief security officers. Somebody gets their nose in there and gets involved in that. So five to seven people involved in this deal.

**April Dunford** (00:55:26):
And so here's where I think we go off the rails in marketing. So what I see marketing teams doing is they'll do personas for all those people. So they'll have this sheet and the sheet will say, Eric, the IT person doesn't like talking on the phone, who really likes video games. And they'll have this stereotype of Eric, the IT person. And then they'll say, Janet, the sales rep really outgoing, loves talking to people on the phone. Doesn't know what a video game is, that sort of thing.

**April Dunford** (00:56:01):
So for positioning work, I'm going to say something that is contentious, but I don't think it is at all. Think about how the deal gets done. Here's how this actually happens. Vice president says to John, "Go figure it out." John then does all this research and figures out how to get a short list.

**April Dunford** (00:56:18):
And then John might actually go all the way through to having calls with sales people and all this sort of stuff with all the vendors. And then John's really getting down to, okay, I'm going to pick this thing over this thing and then starts bringing in the other people.

**April Dunford** (00:56:30):
So by far the most important persona that matters is that one. We call this the champion in the account because this person, their job is to get consensus and champion the deal across everybody, including their boss, who's the actual economic buyer, the person that writes the check.

**April Dunford** (00:56:49):
And so if our positioning doesn't resonate for that champion, we're dead in the water. We don't even get on a short list. We don't even get to care about all the other personas, if we don't nail it with John because John's a gatekeeper.

**April Dunford** (00:57:03):
So my positioning needs to crush it with John. And at some point way down the road, I need to arm John to be able to sell IT, to be able to sell purchasing, to be able to make sure everybody is cool on the user side and to be able to sell their boss, who's the economic buyer.

**April Dunford** (00:57:22):
And so I think there's really only one persona that really, really matters in this, which is the champion in the account. And we should be very thoughtful and we should really have our arms around that persona. And then later in the deal cycle, we need to figure out how to arm that persona to go sell to all the other constituents in the deal. But if we don't nail that champion persona, we got nothing.

**April Dunford** (00:57:46):
So I think it is an utter waste of time for marketing to build these stupid little one pager persona things for these 17 million personas and treat them like they're the same as the champion, when the champion matters times a thousand and all we really need to do is figure out how to arm the champion, because the champion's going to do this, the heavy lifting of selling IT. We're likely not even going to get all that involved. Gee, that's my [inaudible 00:58:12].

**Lenny** (00:58:13):
That was amazing. I've never heard it described so directly and clearly. And so I think that's actually a good way to just wrap things up. I feel like I've sucked up enough of your time. Where can folks find your book, contact you if they want to work with you, anything like that?

**April Dunford** (00:58:29):
Sure. The book's called Obviously Awesome, and you can Google me and find that wherever books are sold. And then there's an audio book, if that's your jam or an E-book or whatever. And then my website is aprildunford.com, so you can find me there. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter. I'm @aprildunford on social media, but I don't really do any social media except Twitter and a little bit of LinkedIn these days because I'm feeling less certain about the future of Twitter, but yeah.

**Lenny** (00:58:56):
Your tweets are great by the way. I highly recommend following April on Twitter.

**April Dunford** (00:58:59):
Oh good. Yeah, follow of me on Twitter.

**Lenny** (00:59:01):
How can listeners be useful to you?

**April Dunford** (00:59:03):
That's a great question. I don't know. Well, one thing I will say that I really love about Twitter is I use Twitter a lot to clarify my thinking on things. And so I really appreciate smart interactions with people on Twitter because sometimes I'll have a half-baked idea. And it's one of the things that I really like about Twitter versus LinkedIn, if I have a half-baked idea, I throw it out on LinkedIn and everyone goes, "That's great April," and that's it. Whereas if I have a half-baked idea and I throw it out on Twitter, people aren't shy about telling me I'm wrong.

**April Dunford** (00:59:36):
And I appreciate it because I think that's how your thinking gets clearer. I mean, I'd like you to be nice about it if possible, but I like it when people jump in and they go, "Well, actually that doesn't really work if it's this, this and this." And you're like, "Ooh yeah, actually, you're right. Never really thought about that before."

**April Dunford** (00:59:52):
So people that follow me on Twitter are really useful that way. And then I think I have this really engaged, thoughtful bunch of people following me on Twitter, people that are really interested in this stuff. And so I think it's kind of fun to be able to bat some deeper ideas around on stuff and not just have everybody go thumbs up, yay, April. That's kind of boring to me.

**Lenny** (01:00:12):
Radical candor, that's what you need.

**April Dunford** (01:00:13):
Oh yeah, I appreciate the thumbs up. Give me the thumbs up, but if that's all I was trying to do, then I wouldn't be throwing out as much half-baked, sort of controversial hot takes on Twitter as I do.

**Lenny** (01:00:26):
I use Twitter in a very similar way, and so I completely understand that aspect.

**April Dunford** (01:00:30):
Yeah, it's great for that.

**Lenny** (01:00:31):
It's amazing for that. April, thank you so much for making time. I learned a ton and I really appreciate your time.

**April Dunford** (01:00:36):
All right. Well, thanks so much for having me and congratulations on the new podcast. I'm so excited for it.

**Lenny** (01:00:42):
Me too. Me too. That was awesome. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the chat, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You could also learn more at lennyspodcast.com. I'll see you in the next episode.

---

## [3/8] Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, a playbook for hiring leaders, getting ahead in you career, how to get started angel investing, more

**Lenny** (00:00:00):
I sometimes wonder how someone like go Gokul Rajaram can exist. He has an intense full-time job at DoorDash where he leads a significant part of the product in business. He also served as a board member at the Trade Desk, Coinbase and Pinterest, all public companies. He's also a prolific investor and seemingly on the cap table. Every successful startup that I come across and at the same time, he's one of the most humble and nicest people you'll ever meet. If you look him up, you'll notice he always just calls himself a startup helper and I know that he makes a lot of time to mentor and help a lot of founders. We cover a lot of ground in our conversation, including picking where to work, how to do product development startups, structuring your product teams, hiring and angel investing. I hope that you enjoy our chat.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:02:53):
Thank you Lenny. It's awesome to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Lenny** (00:02:54):
It's absolutely my pleasure. You're on the boards of Coinbase and Pinterest, you're a really big deal at DoorDash. You're even bigger deal at Caviar. You worked at Square, at Facebook, at Google. Plus you're an incredibly prolific investor. I'd probably put you in the top 1% of investors based on what I've seen. And so I'm just curious kind of just to set context, how did you get into tech and product originally? And then just what was your journey like to becoming this luminary of tech?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:03:24):
First of all, let's not start use the word luminary. I think it's people like Elon and Mark who are luminaries, I think. I've just been lucky to work at good companies and observe the creation and growth of these companies. I'll give you an interesting story. Crazily enough, I joined Google as a PM after I applied to Cisco. This was in 2003, and I wanted to be a hardcore networking product manager in the layer three, layer two of networking. I was like, layer seven software is for wimps. I'm going to go hardcore.

Cisco had a... In 2001, 2002 right after the bust, the first dot com bust. Then Cisco actually rescinded my offer. They made me an offer, they rescinded it, and then basically that's how I ended up at Google. Was my second choice after Cisco. So literally you can see some of these decisions. You're just saved from yourself by [inaudible 00:04:08], and otherwise I would have been in networking, probably. Maybe still at Cisco. But at Google I got put on something called syndication, which is taking Google searches results and ads and then syndicating it to other properties like AOL back in the day, Yahoo, et cetera.

And I was working on that product and at about 6:00 PM... We had offices then, back then at Google, 2002, 2003, people would go home and some people would stay back. I'd just walk around and a few doors from me, I basically found a group of engineers in an office and they were working on something. I was like, "What are you working on? They said, "Well," Serge Brin, the co-founder had given them a project of essentially reversing what Google had done with search. You type in a phrase, set of keywords and then Google identifies the webpages that are most relevant to the set of keywords. So we have an index that matches keywords and webpages, so why don't we extract those keywords for any given webpage and basically see if we can target ads based on that? So that seemed interesting. Google's AdWords product, which was such, ads had just started scaling up and I was like, "Hey, do you have any PMs working with you?"

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:05:09):
They said, no. "Can I be your PM?" They said, "Aren't you working on syndication?" I said, "Yeah, but I can do this nights and weekends." So I basically became a part-time PM for them and help them talk to customers, even did presentations with them. And while my full-time job was this other thing. And essentially within three months this thing grew big enough and fast enough and became a product that my boss saw this and she moved me over to full-time work on this, and that became Google AdSense. So a lesson for me I realized is that it's very important to do a core job really well at any company, but it's equally important to have curiosity and be open to serendipity. I think Zoom makes it harder, but it's very important to understand what else is going on at the company, what else people are working on, and just keep talking to people and build relationship with the company, because those are what will lead to the next set of opportunities.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:05:57):
I think many opportunities don't come linearly just working in your job and making sure you get promoted. That's not how I think great careers are built. I think great careers are built by knowing a lot of people doing great work so they know and want you on their teams, and just waiting for serendipity and then seizing it and jumping. Another example is I had advised a company which was acquired by Square, and the fundraiser in Google. And Jack, the CEO of Square, asked the founder who was one of the best product people he knows. My name was mentioned. So then they reached out to me and I would never have really... I mean, informal advising. I didn't have any equity of something in the company. I just helped them out because they reached out to me because it was a former colleague and I said, "Sure, I'll help you out."

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:06:38):
And then that resulted in him saying good things about me and that led to the inbound from Square. So I think you got to prioritize this stuff. I mean you got to be careful it doesn't take up your life, but I think it's very important to be curious and open to serendipity. I realize in today's world there are lots of crazy serendipity things that happen. If you take inbounds from smart people and you just chat with them and you help them out.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:06:58):
Paying it forward is the other thing, paying it forward. Lenny, you're a great example to this, you pay it forward so much. Your articles, stuff you write, good things happen in ways that you don't even realize. You build up a reservoir of goodwill that comes back to help you in different ways.

**Lenny** (00:07:12):
I love this advice. I don't know if you know this already, but I actually did a TEDx talk once about serendipity. It's called Losing Your Serendipity. It's out there on the internet, in case people want to-

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:07:21):
I'm going to check it out. Wow.

**Lenny** (00:07:22):
Long time ago. But I love, love that concept and it's such a good story. Just kind of pulling that thread a little bit, I'm curious, when you're looking for opportunities, would you suggest people focus on things they're excited about and passion that's pulling them in?

**Lenny** (00:07:36):
Or more, I just think there's a big opportunity and maybe I'm not so excited about doing the work, but I'm just going to follow it because it may lead somewhere. Or some, right in the middle? How do you think about that?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:07:46):
I think you got to think about the day to day. In many cases I feel people don't realize whether they're passionate about something or not until they actually start doing the work. I could never ever imagine that I could be passionate about payments ever in a million years, but the environment of the company Square was so infectious and great and the culture was so good that we even made working on payments... And you're serving these small businesses. I always think of, not what you're working on but what problem you're solving. In many cases, I get more energy from the problem I'm solving and who I'm solving it for and I realize that I get much more energy from personally solving problems that affected a small business or basically people or small business that I can relate to. It is harder for me to get energy solving problems of big enterprise and companies.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:08:28):
So I've always somehow ended up working at companies like DoorDash or Square or even Facebook, building ad product for small businesses, Google AdSense for small publishers. And so consumers for small businesses is what I've seen. And so I think it's important to know what kind of problems you get energy from and really think about the problem versus the customer segment. Maybe even more than the problem because I've saw different kinds of problems, but I realize that it's those kinds of customers I enjoy because you can meet them in the day to day. You can see them on the street or you read their articles. A small blogger for example, I remember I used to go to a lot of blog conferences when I was a PM for AdSense. It was great to meet these bloggers. They would be hundreds of thousands of them back then.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:09:10):
It's probably different, Medium and so on, now, Substack, but back then it was blogger. I think the word doesn't even exist today, but it's amazing to meet them and they literally... Till today I have people emailing me, "Gokul, I know you right? We used to make a hundred thousand dollars a year based on purely AdSense, and that was our living and that's how we built this other company on that." So big companies, you don't ever get to hear something like that. So I got energy from things like that. The other one is founder. I think, Lenny, it's very important if you think... Talking about company, is to have a founder, when you talk to them, you don't get the sense that they're in it for the money. I think it's very important for founders to really live and breathe the mission themselves in an authentic way.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:09:48):
And if people are smart, and I think you've got to really honestly think if this person is constantly talking about revenue and trying to convince you that you're going to get wealthy or they're going to get... Whatever the case is, that's not the kind of founder that's going build a really large company. And so if you look at everyone, whether it's... You've worked with Brian Chesky, I'm sure he embodies that. Jack at Square, Tony at DoorDash, Larry at Google, all of these folks embody that mission. Mark at Facebook. That they care about winning. They will win and money will come, but it's a side product. It's not the main thing they're aiming for.

**Lenny** (00:10:18):
That's a good segue. A question I wanted to talk about is when someone's looking for a company to join, knowing that you've worked at a lot of really successful companies, what else should people look for when they're trying to decide where to go? So what we've talked about so far is, a founder that really wants to win and is really driven, and then a problem that you want to solve? Is there anything else?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:10:35):
I think those are the two things. One thing to look at, I would say, is that it is important to see if this company can become the number one player in its segment. I'll give you an example. I convinced someone who's going to take a very senior role, let's just say a tier two or tier three e-commerce company, to become a, not... So, basically take one step down at different company, which is at Coinbase, basically. I sat on the board of Coinbase, and I think that person still thanks me because I think they were focused too much on the title, that they were going to be the super senior person at this company on the management team, et cetera. But I said, "Ultimately you don't realize this, but the value of working at a leader in any space, the quality of talent you work with, the brand, the network effect, so many things accrue to you. I would much rather be the number two or number three person."

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:11:25):
If you think of it that way, and the leader in a space, than the top person. Say Google versus Yahoo. I saw even if you're the VP of product at Yahoo or the head of product at Yahoo versus a ICPM at Google, you probably want to be the ICPM at Google. I bet you all day long, all day long. Yahoo is a great company, but Google is just a different caliber and different class. So I think it's very important to try to work at, obviously you don't know who the winner is, but if you think that's that something is a winner in a space, in large space, so many benefits that recruit from working at winners. You get unfair brand halo because you worked at a winner. People attribute a lot of the... "Oh yeah, you worked at a winner. Hence, you must be a winner." Probably not the case, but you can... I'll take it.

**Lenny** (00:12:07):
So along those lines and kind of touching on your investor experience, what should folks look for to think about, is this going to be a winner? Or should they maybe join when it's like a series B, series C when it's kind of clear that it's doing well? Do you have any thoughts? Maybe for either a new person joining the workforce, maybe PM, let's say, or even later?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:12:25):
Personally, I feel like Hunter Walk wrote a very good post on it. He said that people who are joining the workforce new should generally join mid-stage companies because mid-stage companies you get some mentorship and it's not just basically whatever needs to be done and ultimately you don't build any deep skills. So mid-stage company I would define as something that is a multi hundred person company, but not maybe a thousand person company.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:12:46):
Somewhere from 300 to 500 people that has not just reached product market fit, but product market, channel fit. And the first product ideally is, the current product is on the way to becoming almost bulletproof. It's going to be a very, very strong product. And then it's really a path to becoming a platform beyond a product, where the company's thinking about, "How do I become a platform?" They have multiple products that serve the same customer, different problems, and they all complement and interlock with each other.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:13:12):
So because, looking back on a career, always without really thinking about it, as employee number six, seven or 800 at Google, employee number, few hundreds at Facebook, employee number seven, 800 at Square. DoorDash was slightly later because just through an acquisition. So it was like I think 1,500 or something like all around. But DoorDash also, I think, yeah, but I think that's basically, at least for me, has worked.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:13:35):
And this is even when I was not a newbie, as I was in my career. So it's really a good spot I feel if you're joining a company. For many reasons.

**Lenny** (00:13:43):
And this advice is for, you're saying new people but also maybe people further along in their career?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:13:48):
I think unless you know the founders very, very, very well, joining a very early stage company is, especially now for the next one or two years, it's going to be a brutal market out there. So you've got to be really careful. There's going to be the days of raising around, few weeks after raising your prior round, of couple of months without much movement, without much company progress have... Are probably gone for most companies. And we all have seen now companies that have raised round at crazy valuations, deflate or die quickly. And so that's happened very quickly. You might just join and your company could die a week from now. So I think the other one is to really look at the financials and really understand that better.

**Lenny** (00:14:29):
Awesome. That's really helpful advice. You mentioned Brian Armstrong, Brian Chesky and some of the other folks that you have worked with and gotten to know. I'm curious, of the companies you've worked at, say now Coinbase, on the board, Google, Facebook, Square, DoorDash, what are some things that have kind of stuck with you?

**Lenny** (00:14:46):
Things you've taken away about how to run a company, build a product? Or anything else that's just taught you a lesson about how to do what you're doing?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:14:54):
One of the most interesting things I've realized is there are multiple paths to greatness. What I mean by that is if I were to look at one word to describe each of the companies I have actually worked at. Google would be technical. It is very, very technical, technology focused, because Google believe, if you build great technology, they will come. Facebook was very growth focused. Very much, here's a goal, we want to hit 1 billion MAUs, let's work backwards from there. Square was very design focused. Let's build the cleanest minimalistic design, the most well designed product, then good things happen. DoorDash by nature is more operational, probably the right word to use where product and operational intertwined. Uber probably is the same word. So I think there are multiple paths to greatness, but I think the founder and market fit in terms of even the type of company that's needed is very strong.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:15:46):
In other words, I think founders have to be authentic to themselves. The other thing I saw is that each founder, whether it's Tony Shoe at DoorDash or Jack, they all had their distinctive styles but they didn't try to change their style. In some ways the company was built almost in their image in some ways and that was fine. I think if you try to build a company that's inauthentic to who you are as a founder, that's not going to work. So ultimately you want to... If Jack tried to build a company that sold enterprise software, I don't think that would've worked. That's not who he is. And so you want a founder and a company culture that are essentially synonymous and founders to be authentic. And I think finally the one other thing that I've seen is, the product itself ideally needs to have some remarkability.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:16:33):
What I mean by that is, it needs to be better than anything else that solves that pain point along a few dimensions that really matter, even if it's worse along other dimensions. So I think every great product, it needs to have a lot of word of mouth. I think especially nowadays, I'm seeing a lot of consumer companies challenged because they relied on Facebook or paid media to drive customer acquisition, and bunch of young companies are coming to me saying, "What do we do now?"

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:17:01):
I'm like, "Look, the biggest thing you did wrong initially was you didn't pay enough attention to organic growth. Basically, was this product compelling enough that people talk about it and bring other people along? And you completely relied on paid and that's coming back to bite you."

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:17:16):
So a good metric is that 40 to 50% of your new customers should ideally come from organic channels and 50% from paid. If 90% come from paid, that means at some point that the music is going to stop.

**Lenny** (00:17:27):
Unless you've got some magical insight or someone that's just killing it.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:17:31):
A growth pack, right? Everyone's looking at this growth tag, but there is no... There's nothing like the silver growth tag bullet.

**Lenny** (00:17:37):
It's interesting, there are a couple companies I'm an investor in that are actually still working really well through paid. And so it's definitely possible but incredibly hard.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:17:45):
Yeah, those are exceptions that prove the rule.

**Lenny** (00:17:48):
What I think of when you talk about this is that something Seth Godin shared a while ago that I always come back to you, this idea that your product has to be remarkable where people want to remark on it, for it to have a chance, especially in consumer, because that's how things start to grow. People just can't help but talk about it.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:18:04):
Exactly. Very well said.

**Lenny** (00:18:06):
Easier said than done. Okay, so getting a little tactical. I'm curious to get your take on just the product development process at companies. How do you think about founders setting up a product development process? What do you recommend usually? And then maybe further down the line, when they get to like 25 people, maybe 50 people, how do you advise founders think about their product development process in the early stages and then as they evolve?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:18:30):
I think first of all, the planning period is different at the very early stage. At the very early stage, it needs to be a weekly plan, where while as you grow the granularity, you still need weekly plans, but you also need quarterly plans that wrap around that. You start with quarterly goals. In fact, I was talking to a series A company and they were just starting the first several quarterly plan. They just did series A round, so they need to plan at a quarterly level and then it translates back into the weekly level. When you're very young, you're literally going week to week. And then once you become much bigger, you get to annual planning, which then leads to quarterly goals and so on. So the granularity is different. The second thing is the tools you actually use. I think initially you just have a very simple spreadsheet.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:19:13):
I am a big believer that you can have all these fancy project management tools. Whenever I've been a leader in a product team, I've never imposed a certain tool because I feel different PMs and teams find the right tool for them. It's about keeping it super simple. If you have too many complex tools, people don't know how to use them. Engineering teams typically use something like Jira, and as a product person you don't want another complex tool for them to use to figure out things. So a simple spreadsheet, and your founder that you update with things to do and people who are going to do it. And then that's basically it. I think as you grow, you start wanting to write a little bit more surviving, the first thing you start doing. And then as a very young company, you don't have a separate product strategy from a company strategy.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:19:55):
The product and company strategy are the same. As you start growing, you have a go-to market strategy, product strategy, et cetera, et cetera. So you start more clearly separating out the company strategy from the product strategy. The first thing you start seeing is when a product manager joins... So I think of course what happens is that the 25 person status, you have a PM who sometimes joins the company. I think the right time for PMs to join the company is about eight to 10 engineers or so. Anywhere between five and 10. But 10 engineers is... Unless the founder themselves wants to be the PM, but that's when you start seeing a professional PM join and the PM typically wants to clearly articulate. Good PMs want to articulate what the product strategy is based on company strategy. So you start seeing the emergence of a separate product strategy doc that is written at the 20, 23 person stage, and the product strategy then makes choices. What customers are we serving? More clearly articulates what have been implicit hopefully earlier.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:20:51):
And then that guides product development. And then I think when you get really large, you have essentially multiple interlocking products that there are multiple product strategy docs. And then you get into more cross functional strategy docs, into product strategy doc, et cetera. But I think at the very core of it, there are two things. One, the team still needs to meet on a daily basis. There is a standup cadence, and that atomic team of six, seven people, which is engineers, product person, designer, hopefully an analyst, they are the product development team. And they still review the tasks on a weekly basis, but where it emanates from when you're young, it doesn't have any roots. It's literally, they're just living and dying on a week by week basis, trying different things till they get product market fit.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:21:38):
As you go bigger and you have product market fit, you start building plans around that. And these iterations, these sprints then emanate working back from the goals that you set on a quarterly basis.

**Lenny** (00:21:49):
Wow. So much good advice. There's a couple things I want to follow up on there. What are some common pitfalls you've seen in startups trying to set up product development processes or the way they build product? What do you find are some of the more common mistakes that founders make? That early teams make?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:22:04):
The biggest one I think is, the founder becomes too tactical and disempowers their team. I think the founder thinks they know what customers want. I think they don't empower their teams enough and they basically just tell the engineers what to build. And I think that leads to teams that are basically tactically just shaping feature after feature without truly solving problems. And I think that then creeps into when you hire a PM, they see this is how the company's working and they then also start working the same way. I think the best founders early on trust their engineering teams and product development teams to solve problems and more clearly present a problem to them and help them. And this is true for PMs also. They help them brainstorm solutions and try to work with the team to understand why we chose a certain solution versus another solution. And then the team feels empowered to go build it versus it dictating them.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:23:00):
Why should we build an iOS app, while the actual problem to solve is we want to increase the percentage of people using a service to five times a week versus two times a week. And building an iOS app is one tactic, but there are many other tactics. Which is improving our web experience, et cetera. So decision making and transparency of decisions around how products change customer behavior is probably the... And that leads to the culture of what is called a feature factory, where product teams basically are very proud of shaping feature after feature without truly knowing how much impact the feature has. If a feature is shipped, but it doesn't change customer behavior at all, is it really a feature or no? It's like a tree falling in the forest.

**Lenny** (00:23:41):
Oh my god, I love that. And I've definitely seen these teams that you're talking about and that only becomes worse once they hire a PM. I like your rule of thumb of hiring a PM when you've gotten eight to 10 engineers. What points to it's time to hire a PM, other than that? Is there other things you've seen of just like, "Oh my god, this team really needs a PM," or they should wait longer? What have you seen there?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:24:04):
I always feel that you should hire to solve a problem you're facing. You should never hire... Or you feel you're going to face. But especially I think just over-hiring, especially... You want to be efficient and smaller teams are always good. Smaller companies are always good, part of the problem. So there are many teams. First of all, the question is if the founder is able to play the role, someone needs to play the role of a product manager. If the founder is able to and willing to play the role of product manager. The problem is with eight to 10 engineers, if the founder is doing other things besides playing the role of a product manager, then the eight to 10 person engineering team is not being cared for and fed.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:24:39):
Engineers are by far the most expensive resources in the company. By far, right? I mean if you look at the composition of engineers versus... And PMs versus any other function, it's two to three, equity, cash, everything.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:24:52):
And if you think of it that way, then if you're not caring and feeding and not leveraging this amazing most expensive resource, well, that's a crime. That's a crime. In some ways you got to think about yourself. Am I, as the founder, is this 10 person team or 8 person team being leveraged? Are they solving the right problems? Do they know how to brainstorm? Do they know how to solve problems? Do I have the bandwidth to sit with them and present the right problems, talk to customers, figure out the right sequencing, the right prioritization of problems to work on, et cetera?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:25:25):
And if you're not able to do that, you've got to have someone who can do that full time. And it might be someone from the team. I mean there are two... We can talk about how to hire your first PM and there are many, many-

**Lenny** (00:25:36):
Yeah, let's do it. I definitely wanted to ask that. I know you wrote a great post about this, just how to actually hire your great PM and you have a strong opinion about that.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:25:43):
Yeah, I have a strong opinion and it might be just based on every single company I've been at. The first PM at every company has been someone who's either been an analyst or an engineer or a designer who's worked there already and they just move from their role to being a PM. Why? Because many cases, the role of the PM is actually to be the liaison between the founder, founders and the engineering team. And so it needs to be someone that the founders trust and the engineering team trusts and also they know how the founders and the engineering team work.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:26:16):
And many times if you bring a PM from the outside with a completely different process, many times the organ can be rejected by the body. And so they may not be the best PM you could get in terms of just functional skills, but they would be the best PM from a cultural assimilation. And getting the engineers just to understand the value of a PM and getting the founders to be comfortable, slowly being more hands off. Was it true of Airbnb, also? Was Joe not the first PM?

**Lenny** (00:26:46):
He was. And he was actually an engineer when he joined, so that's exactly how you describe. So say that you hire, or you transition someone from PM into their... Being the first PM. What are some signs that maybe they're not doing too well and things aren't going well and maybe you should go in a different direction?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:27:03):
I think the biggest one is I always feel with PMs it's actually two or three things you can look at. One is, you can actually just ask the engineers themselves. Engineers are fairly blunt. And when I manage PMs, I've seen that they always tell me... Engineering managers in particular, they're very, very quick to tell you, "Look, this person is not working, they're not being effective."

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:27:27):
What value are they adding? And I think just number one thing you have to do is you have to, just because you hire a PM doesn't... You can't abdicate that responsibility of understanding how the team is doing. It's not gone. You've got to talk to the engineers and designers constantly to see, is the product manager adding value? Second, if you see the PM, the newly anointed PM still get too much into the how to build the product, which is really the domain of the engineers and designers.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:27:53):
See? That's the other failure case where you've got to... And this is something through coaching comes. Obviously they just were an engineer or designer two weeks ago and now they are a PM. There's a immediate impulse to start going back into their comfort zone. And the key is to really push them to go more strongly biased towards customers and push them more towards talking to customers, understanding customer problems. And I think every PM, we all know this, all of us as PMs, there was no class to be a PM. So there are some people who joined APM programs directly out of school, but most of us are engineers, marketers, analysts, designers. And we became PMs after that. So we all come with inherent biases and ways of doing things and it's only a function of how long it takes us to shed... Or at least to not be that persona, but to actually take on a PM persona.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:28:45):
And so I personally believe in the growth mindset a lot. The reason that hopefully this person was chosen to be the PM is the founder saw that this person has the characteristics, traits, which is curiosity, the customer centricity, communication skills, being able to facilitate discussion, all of those things that a PM should have. Problem solving skills. And so hopefully those are things they didn't just pick a random engineer out of the 10, but they picked the right engineer, the right designer. And I think if you do that and you surround them with some good mentors, I think in six months they'll make good PMs.

**Lenny** (00:29:21):
I love that. Maybe just try randomly. You never know.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:29:21):
Good work.

**Lenny** (00:29:25):
Just to close the loop on the idea of when it's time to hire a PM, somebody may be listening to this and feeling like, "Oh, we got to get a PM in ASAP." What are some signs or reasons to wait a little bit longer before you hire your first PM?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:29:39):
If everything is going well? In other words, if your product team is clicking, if they're empowered and if you feel that they can take problems that you're giving them, not just tactics, but they're able to take a problem. Hey, we need to improve new user acquisition and the product team, the whatever, your product development team, which is just engineers able to take that and essentially act on it and suggest three different ways to improve user acquisition.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:30:04):
For example, choose the one that has the best ROI, how you measure it, and then execute on that and then run a test to say, "Look, it did improve user acquisition?" That's a well defined product team. So I think you need an empowered product team that takes ownership and can take a problem, figure out all the options to solve the problem and then prioritize them. And so if you feel that's happening, you don't need a PM. But I've seen that it's hard as engineering teams grow. To engineers, I think they do need that partner. They really that partner to help facilitate that for the most part.

**Lenny** (00:30:39):
That's awesome advice. And yeah, I think that's going to be-

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:30:42):
I think infrastructure is a great example. I think Stripe for example, is famous for not hiring PMs because I think when your audience is developers, they know their audience really well. And so I think many dev ops and developer facing companies, they don't have that many PMs. The PM to engineering ratio is very small. Even in Stripe today I bet it's much smaller than other companies. So those are exceptions that engineers truly understand the domain better. So the machine learning companies, infrastructure companies generally I think need fewer PMs. And this is true for any consumer product company. I bet Airbnb's infrastructure team had zero PMs, or very few PMs because they are serving other engineers. So I think those products, I think you need much fewer PMs than consumer facing products.

**Lenny** (00:31:27):
**Gokul Rajaram** (00:32:27):
There we go, that's right. The designers played the role of the PM.

**Lenny** (00:32:30):
Somebody's got to be doing the job, right? Hopefully they enjoy it, sometimes they don't.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:32:35):
That's right.

**Lenny** (00:32:36):
Okay. So say you've hired your first PM, you're building a product team. Something I wanted to get your take on is, as PM teams grow, sometimes they end up changing who they're reporting to. Sometimes it ends up being a CPO, sometimes a GM, sometimes like even a CTO in some cases. Do you have any thoughts on when it makes sense for product teams to report to say a GM versus a chief product officer or something else? Do you have any advice there?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:33:03):
Yeah, I've worked at companies where it's both functional, products orgs are functional. Where all the PMs report into the head of product, reports to a CEO, as well as a GM structure where PMs report into a GM, as do an engineering leader and a design leader and even a sales leader, marketing leader, et cetera. So both can work, but ultimately you want, I do think once you have three to four PMs, you do want those three to four PMs to report to a functional product leader just because I feel they want a mentor, first of all. They want a coach. And you want to build a product culture and hopefully discipline across those four or five PMs because the leverage you get. Someone said this, I think a few years ago, I remember this, engineers are obviously very important to hire, but a bad PM... You can get incredible errors from a good PM, but a bad PM can really screw up, can screw up the work of 10 engineers.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:34:01):
So it's much more important to hire good PM than it is to hire a good engineer. Any good one. Because there's so few PMs for every engineer, that one good or bad PM can really screw up everything, compared to the impact of one good or bad engineer. So what that means for me is that if you have four or five PMs, and the one way to up level them is to actually make sure the four together are sharing best practices, learning, hopefully building a culture. And I think it's hard for a GM who's also managing other functions to do that.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:34:32):
So I would say yes, maybe one or two PMs could report into a CEO or a GM or someone else, but once you get into a four or five PM team, they probably should report to a dedicated of product manager whose job is to be a mentor, be a coach, attract strong new folks to the team, hire, build a strong culture, et cetera, et cetera.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:34:57):
That product manager, I think they could report to the CTO, they could report to the CEO, they could report to the GM. I don't think that matters. But the ICPMs is what I'm more worried about. Who do they report into? I think they should report into a dedicated manager once it gets a certain size.

**Lenny** (00:35:12):
Awesome. I could not agree more. Another thing I've seen, as a lot of companies go one direction, they go GM models, then they go back to something else where it's completely business unit oriented and functional reporting and then they go back. So I found it, just try something. See if that works. You can always change it in the future. That's super common.

**Lenny** (00:35:30):
I wanted to transition to hiring, talk about hiring. You recently had this incredible thread on Twitter about how to hire a leader and I think maybe just a product leader, maybe broadly, leader. And so for folks that haven't seen that or have time to go on Twitter, I'd love to just hear your advice on how to hire a leader for a company.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:35:49):
That post actually was triggered by, that morning, one of my company CEO messaged me that, "Wow, I hired someone from this company. How'd you know this person was available from this company?" I was like, "I didn't know about this person, I just knew this company was really good at sales. And so that's why I recommended the company." And he said, "This is the third time I hired based on advice you gave and these are all senior leaders here. How did you do that?" I'm like, "Actually, thinking about it, you're right."

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:36:19):
When companies ask me... Because the number one, if you ever ask a company, "What's the thing that's keeping you up at night?" They'll always say one of the things always that's keeping them at night, "I want to hire a leader for X, Y, Z function." And I never respond with, here's a person. I'll always say, "Well, you're in this space selling to this kind of customer or serving this kind of customer. Let's think about the best in class companies, who's also, who's very good at functionally the thing you're hiring for, serving the similar type of customer."

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:36:48):
And so basically that was the origin of the post. And really what it says is, in order to hire, if you want to have a playbook for hiring good leaders or strong leaders for any function, look at best of class companies or companies that are best of class at that function in the similar space. Not your competitors, but you've got to look beyond your competitors. You've got to look at folks who are serving SMBs or enterprises or whatever this... Or consumers. And then say, "Okay, I want to hire a head of marketing." Great. This is the hardest thing. Go to find the top three or four companies who are excellent at marketing to consumers. If that's what you're... Then you don't hire the person, the head of marketing at these companies.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:37:31):
You hire the person who's reporting to them, the lieutenant. And actually, Adam Zamos, who was the head of people at Square chimed into say, "At Square, early days we used to go..." He used to run people, the people team at Square. "We used to go and hire the up and coming lieutenants of the lieutenants." And so I think you basically have to build almost an org chart and it's not that hard. You just have to spend time on LinkedIn, to say who are all the people in the org? Who reports to? And you can ask some of your friends who work at a company to better construct the org chart and you just literally go through that company and pick out the people. And I saw this in practice because once Square went public, we were the only public finTech in 2015, one of the very few public fintechs.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:38:16):
And so my goodness, our teams were raided. The next two years, I literally saw the full team, a huge chunk of a team in different parts of payments, compliance, risk, just being raided by other fintechs. And I saw that this was being followed. Because you say, "Okay, who's the company who's best in being in compliance? Square." And I'm sure there are other companies also, but Square was well known because it was public and it was large, they had done it at scale, et cetera. They didn't go after our head, they went after the lieutenant and the lieutenant of the lieutenant, et cetera.

**Lenny** (00:38:46):
I see. So you saw this happening to you and then you've weaponized it in reverse. I love it. Great advice. I've never heard this advice before and it sounds incredibly good. And so thank you for sharing all that. Thank you. On the front of hiring, how much time do you think founders and leaders should spend on hiring? What percentage of their time have you seen the best founders and leaders spend?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:39:07):
Obviously you've got to always be hiring. Even today, I think Tony and DoorDash, if you have good strong people, you'll always say, "Please make the intro if you have some amazing people," because you never know what you learn from these people, even if you don't end up hiring them. So, always want to meet great people. But I think in general a founder of a young company should spend I think two hours a day hiring and you should do it during the time. I think the challenge in hiring is, you've got to build a process first of all, and that takes a lot of heavy metal work, the right process for you to make sure you do reach out. And again, there are two parts of hiring, there's a lot of reaching out to people and then there's actually talking to people. So I would suggest spending one hour a day doing the reach outs and there it should almost be busy work because you almost figure out the process.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:39:56):
So you should do it during the time of day where you don't have to put a lot of mental... Like, you don't need to be fresh because you need the fresh work for your actual company that you're running. But you need some time, fresh time to come up with the right process. How do you do LinkedIn reach out? Or whatever tools you use to reach out to. Who are the types of profiles, what roles you want to prioritize. So you need to find the right hour to do that in. The second hour should be devoted to actually meeting one or two people on a daily basis, and that's two half an hour conversations.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:40:26):
So I think if you just do that, you'll actually, over even 30 days, think about it, you'll meet with 60 people. And you'll do 30 hours of LinkedIn's, just two hours out of say 10 hours a day. And let's say 20 hours, 20 days. So instead of 30. Because of weekday, that's still a lot of time. So I think two hours. Use Calendar. Calendar is your best friend there, use calendar. And I think that's more than enough to do really well on recruiting.

**Lenny** (00:40:50):
I'm guessing that you can see a pretty big difference between the founders that you work with that do this sort of process and put in the time, and don't?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:40:57):
One hundred percent. I think putting in the process upfront is really important because you can flounder around, and then just spending a few, four, five hours upfront, talking to a few folks, coming with a good process can massively improve the because they say, right, it's all about once you aim the strategy or the direction you're going is much more important than the speed you go in.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:41:18):
If you go in the wrong direction, it doesn't matter how fast you go, you're screwed. But if you go in the right direction, even if you go slightly slower, you're going to get there. So I think it's very important to set the direction of hiring, how exactly are you going to hire, what the process is, what your messaging is going to be, and really make sure you nail that before you do stuff.

**Lenny** (00:41:38):
Once you've hired someone, you give them a title. I know you have some strong opinions about titles and how to think about titles at startups and I'd love to hear your take on that.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:41:48):
Yeah, I think on titles, I personally feel that if you're young, you have a unique opportunity as a founder to set a culture in place where people care about scope and impact much more than they would titles. The titles I'm most opposed to, to be honest, I'm not opposed to titles. I think, tweeted about this and people interpret to think no one should have any titles. Titles, people... You want someone to be called a software engineer so you know what they're doing. But the titles I'm most against are director and VP titles. Director, senior director. Because those are the titles that lead to the most contention in the company, that lead to the most conflict, that lead to the most disgruntlement and heartache and managers having to constantly... And people basically staying on for the title, to put it bluntly, versus because their scope and impact.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:42:39):
But I'm also against giving titles too early in a company. For example, I think the general counsel is a good title. I think Wall Street cares about it. It's important to hear who general counsel is, but I was meeting with a 25 person company today and that CEO told me... I was like, I always talk about what keeps you up at night? And this company's in somewhat of a legal heavy space. He is like, "I need to hire a general counsel instantly." I said, "Listen, yes, I know you need to hire a lead lawyer, whatever you call them. Or head of legal, but do not give the general counsel title at a 25 person company because the person at a 250 person company, hopefully you're going to be that in two, three years. It's going to be very different than the GC now. And you might, you still want to retain this person most likely because they're good.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:43:22):
You just don't want them to be the general counsel. She's over and over again. And so, there are certain times you only can give once and if you give it to early, you can't then... That's the reason to avoid title as long as possible. If you give the VP engineering title at 25 people, how the heck are you ever going to have upgrade that person, upgrade that role? You have to basically let them go because you can't then say, "This VP of engineering, now you're going to be made director of engineering or something," et cetera. It's very challenging.

**Lenny** (00:43:50):
When I look at your LinkedIn, it's always funny because I think you're just like, "Startup helper," or when you were running Caviar, I think it was like, "Someone at Caviar," or something very vague. Clearly you live that yourself.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:44:01):
And I saw the impact of it. I saw at, Square I think was the company, and I think Jack came up with this because he saw that Twitter titles were weaponized in different ways. And so he started this at square and that's where I truly saw the impact and never had a single discussion at Square with my team about what the title should be. And that was amazing. At other companies, always, "I want to be promoted director. I want to be promoted to senior director." It's always, during promotion time. If you ask person what their goal is, even personal goals, sometimes they'll even write, I want to be promoted to director, but never had that.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:44:37):
Had stuff of course around scope, impact, compensation, that's great. I want to have conversation about that, but title? No.

**Lenny** (00:44:45):
And just to summarize your advice there, what's kind of the role of thumb of titles if someone hasn't read that post?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:44:51):
Delay it as long as possible and try to avoid granting director and VP level titles as long as possible, in particular.

**Lenny** (00:45:00):
Easy. And then delay it, meaning have-

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:45:02):
Very simple. [inaudible 00:45:05]

**Lenny** (00:45:04):
And delaying titles, meaning like anything other than just software engineer, product management?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:45:08):
Software engineer, lead. The word lead, or head of are both good, because the head of very clearly describes what they do or lead also very clearly describes what they do. So my title was Caviar Lead and then the people who reported to me were Caviar product lead, Caviar engineering lead, Caviar strategy and operations lead, Caviar sales lead, et cetera. And so the more words that are in the title, the more focused their role is. In fact, you can look at Jack's new title, it's Block Head, so it's literally not senior anymore.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:45:40):
It's head of block, a block leader I would say probably should be more appropriate. He's a leader block, and then so on, it premieres down.

**Lenny** (00:45:48):
Amazing. That's incredibly valuable advice and thank you for getting into the details there. I'd love to transition in to talk about investing a little bit before we get to our exciting lightning round. And so you spent a lot of your time angel investing, investing in a bunch of different ways. What's been your trajectory from just starting to angel invest early on to the scale you're at now?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:46:09):
I started angel investing in 2007, 15 years ago. And like many people, I started because my friends and colleagues were leaving to start companies. This is when I was at Google and they were leaving to start companies. So I literally, without going much, I just wanted to support them because I'd worked with them. And so I just put a small check into their companies and some failed, some did really well. But ultimately I realized that for me, investing is all about supporting people much more so than companies themselves. The company itself, it's about the entrepreneur and the person. So till today, I think I have enjoyed the most and I've really come to believe in myself that I am a founder centric. I believe in the founder much more than I do the market. I think there are market centric investors. [inaudible 00:46:56] is amazing and they are very much believe in a big market.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:46:59):
I strongly believe that great founders, and Airbnb's a great example. They create new markets themselves, or they pivot. I mean, if they realize that a certain market is not good, they'll figure out a way to move. And I'm basically, with my check, the biggest mistakes I made early on were after a few checks I said, "Oh, I'm going to be much more selective. I'm not just going to write checks with all my friends. I'm going to look to see what the market they're in."

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:47:25):
So I basically just started making these assumptions, "Oh, well, I should not invest in this company." And turns out, almost all of them were sins of omission. I much more care about sins of omission because you can only lose one X your money. But for me, the relationship with the person, a person I know and respect and good friends with, and I'm not investing in them, I don't want to lose that.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:47:48):
And it's an optionality for me to invest in not just this company, but in every other company they start. Because one of the most interesting patterns I see is, folks who are unsuccessful the first time around, but then use those learnings to start a company in the same or similar space and then succeed. And I'm seeing this more and more happen and I want to have, if you don't invest in their first company, even though you thought they were great because the marketers are great, they won't probably come back to you for the second company either.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:48:16):
So very, very founder centric style of investing, almost like YC, I would say. Closer to YC than anything else because YC invest in just founders at this point, they don't care about the idea. They just care that you're a builder and that you can pivot fast. And if you're a team of builders who can pivot fast, they will invest because they know within three weeks, if you don't have product market fit, they'll get you to pivot three times, and under that excitement, you'll find your product market fit four times. I see this again and again.

**Lenny** (00:48:41):
I love that advice and it's the way I think about it too. The only downside is if you have worked at an awesome company or two or three, it becomes a very expensive hobby because you end up knowing a lot of awesome people that are doing great things. So you have to be a little bit careful.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:48:55):
You've got to really make sure what the motivation. That's what I really want to understand. You don't want folks, there are awesome people, but I do want to make sure they're doing it for the right reason. In other words, they're doing it to solve a problem that they've experienced themselves, or seen. So I really try to get into why they're starting the company and I want to make sure the reason for starting the company is authentic, in that it's a problem that they have observed deeply.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:49:18):
Versus, it's something they read about in Tech Crunch or it's a new US Web three or crypto thing or NFT thing. So I think that's how I suss out. So I don't invest in people, even if they're awesome, when I feel their idea for... The reason they're starting the company is mercenary and they're doing it, because they haven't immersed themselves in the space. Famously, I think the Collison Brothers bought a book, I think on payments, very old book or something I think... Or paper maybe, and read it to fully understand why you want people who really immerse themselves in an industry and live and breathe it before they tackle it.

**Lenny** (00:49:50):
Are there other things like that, that you look for? That are just like, "Oh wow, I really need to invest in this."

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:49:55):
The ability to hire talent before even you have... Or ability that, if you can show me that you have this set of amazing people lined up to join you or that you have commitments, or even your founders. I mean, the other thing I look for is definitely two person founding team. At least two is the ideal. I've seen solo founders I'm very nervous about because I think no one person has all the skills you need to start a company. And it's also a lot of things to do.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:50:18):
So I do like to see a really good mix of basically a builder and a seller or a hustler and a hacker, whatever you call them. And I think that two person, I really feel comfortable, however good the one person is, I just feel it's... There are obviously one person founding teams that have worked well, but I think the two or three person founding teams, I feel much. Two is the ideal number. So I look for the two person founding team, complementary skills.

**Lenny** (00:50:43):
These are really, really handy rules of thumb that everybody could use. How do you find time to do this? So you have a full time job, I imagine it's extremely demanding, and then you're also doing a lot of investing for folks that are thinking about doing this on the side. How do you time box this and keep it sustainable and not just to go crazy and burn yourself out?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:51:00):
Time boxing. Exactly what you said, Lenny, it's time boxing. Most of the time ironically is spent on DoorDash and... Not ironically. Logically is spent on DoorDash even though it may not appear it. So I spend on DoorDash and what I do is a small percent of my time, I basically... I keep looking at my calendar to see, am I spending more than I've worked, say 10 hours a day? Am I spending more than two to three hours, maximum three, ideally two hours a day on things that are needed to do my work?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:51:25):
And three hours actually is a lot. If you think about half an hour meetings with people, that's six meetings you can do a day, out of 10. And I also do two hours each on both Saturday and Sunday so that I can do four meetings each. So if you think about it, six times five is 30, or four times five is 20, plus another four, plus 4... 28 meetings, that's a lot of meetings you can do with people, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, so I think it's really time boxing and knowing... I think it is knowing what matters. Because if you find yourself doing the opposite, where 70% of time is investing, then you should actually become a full-time investor.

**Lenny** (00:51:59):
That's amazing. I don't know how you keep your brain capacity focused on so many things. Meeting with that many founders, even outside the time, is a lot of mental load.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:52:08):
I enjoy it. I think the thing is, I enjoy it because I have been a founder myself, not a very successful one. So one of the things I love hearing, I always start with, "Tell me your founding story." And every founder likes to tell the founding story. And that's where I listen closely for authenticity, to understand how they met each other, the two founders or multiple founders, how they knew each other, and how they came up with this idea that they're going after. Versus what problem they're tackling.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:52:36):
I have a standard set of questions I ask so that way I can spend my time not thinking of questions to ask but just listening and just learning. And then I also have a good ability to forget instantly. I take notes and then I just forget and go into the next meeting. So compartmentalizing well.

**Lenny** (00:52:52):
Have you thought about publishing these questions that you ask? Or do you think that would hurt your chats?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:52:56):
No, I think it seems... Yeah, it seems too formulaic then. I think there's questions that then change based on what the answer. So it's not exactly a set of questions, but it always starts with, "Tell me about your founding story of the company." I introduce myself and then asked them for their founding story. They're all nervous, pitching, et cetera when they pitch someone who could be an investor. We ask them to tell stories. It's the same for customer interviews, right? You never ask customers, "Tell me your top three problems."

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:53:23):
No one knows what they are. But, "Tell me the last time you used a food delivery service. Tell me the last time you used a payment service. How was it? Tell me the last time you took a payment, credit card payment. Tell me about your last customer." People love telling stories about themselves. Everyone likes talking about how they did something.

**Lenny** (00:53:40):
For somebody that's thinking about getting into angel investing, other than having capital and finding capital, what advice would you give folks?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:53:49):
See, the number one thing you need is, I think, besides... Number one thing is capital. Number zero thing. Number one thing is then you need to have deal flow, as they call it, or companies that you're meeting with and deciding. And then you need to know how to pick these companies. So you need to meet companies, you need to know how pick them. As an angel is generally easy. So I think you need to figure out how to get deal flow. And there are three ways to get deal flow to companies. One, you build your own brand. You can be like Lenny, who's built an incredible brand, or none of us can be like Lenny, but you can try to, we can all publish. The reality is, I used to tell every single person, "You can build your brand on the internet. You can build your brand, social media channels."

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:54:29):
There's so many channels. And you have the person here who can teach the masterclass in that. You can build your brand. And just by doing that, you'll get people coming to you. Second, you have a lot of... Anyone in technology has other people they know who are angel investors. So it's just tell them, "Hey, I'd love to help companies. If they're investing in a company, please let we know." And the more people you tell, the more likely it is, they'll remember you. And every time you meet them, reinforce that. And third, investors. If you do know venture capitals or investors, many of them are looking to bring on... There's typically a round when they lead companies around, there's typically an allocation for angels. But for all of those, the first and most important thing is you need to understand, how are you going to add value to these companies?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:55:13):
What is your differentiation? What do you stand for? Why should a company take your money? The best companies have much more than... As Lenny and I both know, their rounds are over subscribed. It is hard enough to get even $1 into their round, let alone a hundred thousand dollars or $5,000. So why would they take your money? And so that's the thing, you have to really figure out. What is your unique differentiation? What do you bring to these companies that no one else can? And I know that's hard, that's painful to figure out, but that is the introspection each of us needs to do.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:55:44):
The way you do that is by just sharing your non-obvious insights. And don't just like... Basically just write. That's why I think writing is so powerful because it shows the world. My rule of thumb is when they do a search for you on Google, if your LinkedIn profile is the first thing that comes up, you've probably done something wrong.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:56:02):
What should come up is an article you wrote. Is a tweet you published. Is someone mentioning you on something else, et cetera. Because that's when, clicking on it, they know what you stand for by that content about you, by you, et cetera. Yes, Mike Morritz can get away with LinkedIn because no one needs to know what he has done. But for the rest of us, we need to build our brand, what we stand for. And it'll change over time. I used to basically believe I should just think about product development, how to lead product teams, engineering teams. For over the last five years, since I've led broader teams, I now share stuff which is much broader than that. And so what I stand for and what value I add has changed and evolved and hopefully increased over time. The same will happen. But you've got to take ownership of your brand on the internet.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:56:46):
No one else can. No one else can. It's not your company. You've got to transcend the companies you work for. If your identity is X, Y, Z, worker drone at A, B, C company, that's not enough. You've got to be X, Y, Z expert in A. Or whatever that A is, even if it's a niche thing, that's okay. Every company leads... So many companies come to me, "I want a payments expert." And then I'll find someone who's a payments expert for them because they're trying to build a fintech practice or something. So be an expert in payments, if that's what you know. Write about non obvious insights on payments. Doesn't need to be a functional discipline like, Lenny and I are doing product or something. Can be a domain. Risk, payments, crypto. Think about crypto, right? The people who got into crypto, and I just read a post by this guy, Richard Chen, he graduated from Stanford.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:57:33):
I don't know him, but I read incredible post. He runs this firm fund called One Confirmation, which is a top fund. He graduated from undergrad four years ago. That's all he did. I mean, he was head of Stanford Blockchain. He wrote, he writes amazing stuff. He's built a brand for himself. Kudos to him. 25 years old, probably.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:57:50):
Never met the guy, but I was like, this guy knows what he's doing. Watch his LinkedIn. Oh my God, he's never worked at a company. He's basically been out of school for four years, but he has incredible insights.

**Lenny** (00:58:00):
Wait till he hears this podcast. He's like, "Holy shit, they're talking about me."

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:58:04):
Yeah.

**Lenny** (00:58:06):
I hope he's a listener and if not, we got to find him. Okay, we are now at the lightning round. And so what I'm going to do, I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions real quick. Whatever comes to mind, let me know. If nothing comes to mind, that's also cool. And then we will wrap up. Are you ready?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:58:21):
Perfect. Ready.

**Lenny** (00:58:22):
Okay. What's a book that you've recommended most to other product leaders?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:58:27):
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. It's a book called Playing to Win and the subtitle is How Strategy Really Works. Very good book.

**Lenny** (00:58:34):
Amazing. I have not read that. I will check that out. What's a company that you recommend to people that are looking for new gigs? Maybe product managers, maybe any other function?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:58:44):
DoorDash. Incredible operational excellence. And what you learn here, I have myself learned a lot in the two years I've been here, about new ways of the attention to detail. Operational excellence, unparalleled.

**Lenny** (00:58:56):
I usually include, you can't mention the company you're working at now. Is there another company by any chance? And if not, you can have that.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:59:02):
I would say Coinbase, if you're interested in crypto. I am technically a board member. I truly believe. I think if you are interested in crypto, Coinbase has such a diverse set of things that they work on that it is literally, you can work on almost any part of crypto, from NFTs to wallets to custody to infrastructure. They have a company they called Bison Trails, which does infrastructure. So you can truly, it's like Google, worked on everything. You could work in YouTube, you can work in search. Coinbase, I think the same thing. You can work in 10 different products and within two years or three years, learn the complete spectrum, crypto ecosystem.

**Lenny** (00:59:37):
Also an Airbnb alumni founder.

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:59:39):
That's right.

**Lenny** (00:59:40):
What's your favorite app right now?

**Gokul Rajaram** (00:59:42):
Over the last few weeks it has been Coinbase wallet. I've been playing around. I just was a hoarder. I basically just had held Bitcoin Ether for many, many years, but then over the last couple of months I just said, got to just... In the Coinbase board meetings, you listen to all of these things. I'm like... Got to now diverse and beyond and actually got to start staking stuff, going on distributed exchanges, or decentralized exchanges and just basically playing around with Coinbase wallet because earlier I wasn't using wallet. I was just using Coinbase dot com where you can't do any of this stuff. And then DoorDash is the other one. I think I truly use it to order food every day. But Coinbase wallet is one I'm using a lot now.

**Lenny** (01:00:24):
Awesome. I got to check that out. I just got access to the Coinbase NFT stuff, and so yes, it'll pull me into the Coinbase ecosystem. Okay, a couple more questions. Who is a favorite person to follow on Twitter or Instagram? Especially these days?

**Gokul Rajaram** (01:00:38):
Exactly. [inaudible 01:00:40].

**Lenny** (01:00:39):
Easy choice. All right. Who's a favorite manager that you've had over the years?

**Gokul Rajaram** (01:00:44):
All of them. I've learned different things through them. So no easy choice there.

**Lenny** (01:00:49):
No favorites. All right. Taking the easy way out. And then what's a favorite interview question that you like to ask in interviews? Not with founders, but with hiring.

**Gokul Rajaram** (01:00:56):
What are you most proud of? The interview question is a good one. Tell me about something that you're most proud of. What is the accomplishment, career accomplishment you're most proud of? Because it tells you how they measure their impact. Tells you a lot about what they care about, how they measure their impact. If they say, "As a PM I launched X, Y, Z feature," they're talking about the impact and the kind they value it. Something about that. Or if they talk too much about them versus the team, et cetera. So you get a lot from that question. It's a loaded question.

**Lenny** (01:01:24):
Amazing. I love that question. Okay. Where can folks find you online and how can people listening be helpful to you?

**Gokul Rajaram** (01:01:31):
I am on Twitter, G-O-K-U-L-R at GokulR on Twitter. And I always say the best way to help me, just help the broader ecosystem. Pay it forward, and if you pay it forward, at some point, whoever you paid forward helps me at some point. But if all of us paid it forward, the world would be a better place. Pay it forward. And then, like I said at the very beginning, believe in the power of serendipity, and I need to listen to Lenny's TED talk on that.

**Lenny** (01:01:58):
Oh boy.

**Gokul Rajaram** (01:01:59):
Serendipity, paying it forward.

**Lenny** (01:02:01):
Amazing. What a great way to wrap it up. Thank you so much for being here. Gokul.

**Gokul Rajaram** (01:02:05):
Thank you, Lenny. Thanks for having me.

**Lenny** (01:02:06):
That was awesome. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the chat, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You could also learn more at Lenny's podcast dot com. I'll see you in the next episode.

---

## [4/8] Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more

**Lenny** (00:00:05):
If you're PM, you've almost surely read and been influenced by Jackie Bavaro. And if you haven't, you're in for a treat. Jackie is behind two of the most important books in the PM cannon, Cracking the PM Interview and Cracking the PM Career. And she's also one of the smartest people I know on the essential skill of product strategy in our chat. We go deep into all the ways that you can become better at developing your own product strategy, including what is strategy, what makes a good and bad strategy and how to very tactically put together a strategy. We also chat about what she's learned going from the first PM at Asana to head of product at Asana, plus a ton of tactical advice on getting to senior PM and then to manager PMs. A big thank you to Jackie for sharing her wisdom with us.

**Lenny** (00:00:51):
This episode is brought to you by flat file. Think of the last time that you imported a spreadsheet, did it work the first time? Chances are it did not. You probably got some weird error and to try a bunch of things like removing the blank title rows above your column headers, or Googling how to save with UTF-8 in coding. What even is UTF? Who cares?

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**Lenny** (00:01:55):
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**Lenny** (00:02:49):
Jackie, I am so excited that we are chatting again. We've done a bunch of fire set chats over the years in various events, and you've always been really generous with your time. I just want to say thank you for joining me. And I'm really excited to chat again.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:03:01):
Yeah. I'm so excited to chat with you. I'm so excited that you're doing a podcast and I'm glad I get to be one of the early people on it.

**Lenny** (00:03:08):
Absolutely. It's my honor. Okay. You are a famous PM in the world of product management. You rode Cracking the PM Interview, Cracking the PM Career, both of which I own and love. And fun fact, my sister was just interviewing as a PM and she used your book and found it, really helpful. So thank you for that.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:03:08):
That's awesome.

**Lenny** (00:03:26):
Yeah. And then also you've written a bunch of classic PM post on Medium that I reference often share with people. And also you were the first PM at Asana ended up being the head of product management at Asana. And that's actually where I left to start. Could you just share how you got into product very early on and then how you worked your way up to the head of product management at Asana?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:03:47):
Yeah. I was just really lucky in finding product management. I went to Cornell, studied computer science and economics, and I'd never heard of the job. One of my friends who'd been a PM intern the summer before I was like, "Jackie, you have to apply for this internship." And I said, "I'm sophomore. I can't be a manager." And they're like, "No, you manage the product, not the people and just go apply." I applied having no idea at all what the job was. Through the interviews, I tried to figure it out. I loved the interview questions. I thought they were a lot of fun and got the job, became an intern on Microsoft SharePoint services and stayed with the team. Loved that team. Went there full time. When I moved to New York, that I started to think about changing companies.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:04:29):
Microsoft didn't have any product management in New York. So I applied to Google and I was like, "Yes, I'm a good product manager. I'm sure I'll get this job." And I got rejected. And I was shocked. I really had thought that I would pass the interview. A year later I applied again and that's when I got into the Google APM program. And of course at the time I thought this was one of the biggest mistakes in my whole career. But looking back, it certainly is what gave me the impetus to write these books and say, "You know what? Even good PMs don't know how to answer these questions. There's a lot we can do to help." And beyond that also then when I be joined Google, I very quickly got sent into being an interviewer. And immediately I noticed there was this real difference in how people would answer the questions.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:05:08):
And some people didn't seem to understand what the question was trying to get at. And some people sounded really good because they'd say, "Well, I'll tell you three things. Number one, number two, number three." And then when I paid attention to my notes, I'd be like, "Wait, their three ideas weren't actually good ideas. They just sounded like they knew what they were doing." Those really drove me to want to share more about how to do well in these interviews.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:05:28):
And at the same time, I constantly had people saying, "Jackie, my friend's applying to Google,. Can you talk to them?" And I was like, "Sure, of course. I'll like tell them what we're looking for." And I'll help them understand the interview process. And after doing this three times, I was like, wait a second, "If it's only my friends of a friend who are people who work at Stanford and are already very privileged and I'm telling them how to pass these interviews, that's not fair."

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:05:51):
If I'm willing to tell it to a friend of a friend, I have to be willing to put that out on the internet and share that with everyone, because we really want to level the playing field that we don't want to make things more unfair.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:05:59):
While I was at Google, one day, I get an email from a friend, from an engineer I'd worked with at Microsoft. And he's like, "Hey, you want to grab coffee?" And I was like, "Oh, cool, sure. I'll be friendly." And at the time I did not realize that that's how all these recruiting chats start. I honestly did not realize that this was like, "I'm being recruited." I thought it was like, let's just catch up. But I said, "Yes." And then he told me about this company and he is like, "Hey, it's like, imagine if SharePoint was really fast." And I was like, "Oh." I love SharePoint, and I would love to work on a fast version of that. And that's how I ended up moving over and becoming the first product manager at Asana and achieve.

**Lenny** (00:06:32):
There's so many things I want to pull on in what you just shared there. On the book, an interesting point you made is that you wrote the book because it was something you were struggling with and then you saw a lot of other people struggling with it. And I find that that's often the case. When you look at books, people have written or posts, it's just like, "Oh, I had this question and this a way for me to get better at it by forcing myself to write about it." Is that basically what happened?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:06:53):
Yeah. I had this belief that almost anybody can learn anything. People have different interests, not everybody wants to learn everything. But I find that if you're having trouble learning something, it's just because something's not clicking. There's just something that you're misunderstanding or that other people see that you're not seeing. And if people could just describe it in the way that matched YOUR mental model, then you could learn it.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:07:13):
That's how I feel about this interviewing. Is that the reason that some people don't do as well as they could on interviews is just because a lot of these interview questions are trick questions. When they say, "Oh, how would you design a bathroom?" I used to think that meant, "What do you want in a bathroom?" And that's not what it means at all. It means "Who is the best customer for a bathroom? What would they want?" But if you haven't been trained in this, you wouldn't know.

**Lenny** (00:07:34):
We're definitely going to talk about interviewing and career and come back to these topics. But going back to Asana, you look at this journey that you took and it sounds amazing and it went great, and someone that's starting out, they may feel like, "Man, how am I ever going to not make any mistakes along my journey and get to a place like Jackie ended up?" A question is just, is there a mistake or some wrong journey took along this journey that you can share?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:07:58):
Yeah, I'm sure I've made lots of mistakes. One of the ones that comes to mind is that in probably my first or second year at Asana, I very much saw the PM's role is a person who wants to say no to everybody. I was like, "All these people want us to do stuff and we would do way too much and we would never get anything important done if we just said yes to them. I need to say no to people." And I got into this defensive mindset and sometimes people would come to me with ideas and I'd be like, "Are you telling me I can't do my job right?" And I would just try to say no to them as efficiently and effectively as possible.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:08:28):
And I did this one day to my boss and he had some idea for design that I thought was a bad idea. And I was just like, "No, we're not going to do that." And he's like, "Jackie, you have to stop shutting me down." And I was like, "I'm about to get fired." I was like, "Oh, I have really, really messed up here." It definitely made an impression on me and I was lucky enough to have a coach at the time. I went to her to talked to her and really started to rethink how I saw the role, this urgency that I felt of "I need to shut people down as fast as possible to the save time," as opposed to take the time to consider that other people probably have good ideas.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:09:03):
And even if their solution, isn't what I think is going to be the absolute best solution, the problem they're talking about is probably real. And I can interpret their solution as a way of sharing the problem and exploring and brainstorming around that.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:09:17):
It wasn't an immediate change, but I remember at one point she challenged me to, "For the next two weeks, say yes to everything." And I was like, "I can't do that. I wouldn't be doing my job." And she's like, "I think you can find a way to do your job and still say yes to people. You can say, 'yes, I agree. That is a real problem. Yes. I think we could test this design with users' and just see what's different with two weeks of saying yes to people instead of no." And I realized that this protectiveness and lockdownness that I had really wasn't something I needed and it wasn't something that was serving me because it meant that I couldn't have real collaboration with the other people around me.

**Lenny** (00:09:51):
Wow. I love that story. A little thread I want to pull on there, two questions. How far into your time at Asana did this happen? Because it's surprising how often things like that come up really late in a career and you're like, "Oh, shit. This is a fundamental thing that I imagined isn't maybe as true as I thought in changing course there." Maybe let me ask that question, how far into your career was that?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:10:10):
This was probably pretty early. I'm imagining what room it was in and I'm like, "Okay. I know what that time was." It was definitely the first year, maybe six months in.

**Lenny** (00:10:17):
Okay. Okay. Cool. Okay. So you have this coach, what impact have you seen from just having a coach? Something that a lot of PMs ask me about is just like, "Should I get a coach? How do I find a coach?" I guess just roughly your experience been with a coach and then any advice for folks thinking about getting a coach.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:10:31):
There's two different models. Some people like to have a coach all the time and that's a person that they can go to and they can explore their ideas and their feelings and how they're just bounce ideas off of all the time, have this person who isn't in any way going to be the person who evaluates them later on. They can be totally honest with them.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:10:48):
For me, I find it's better to have a coach when I have a specific thing I want to work on. I tend to be a little bit results oriented, action oriented, and I don't like to show up and be like, "So, what are we talking about today?" Or make something up. I talked to this coach to deal with this issue of how do I not shut people down and how do I still be a good PM if I'm not saying no to people all the time.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:11:10):
I worked with her for several months, but then once that was gone, then I did start to find that personally I would make things bigger when I had a coach, because I had something that I knew how to solve on my own. And I'd bring it to the coach, and then all of a sudden it felt like it was a big deal rather than a little deal. I've gone in and out of coaching, but I do it when I have a thing that I want to work on.

**Lenny** (00:11:27):
Going back to Asana, you were there for eight years about, what kept you there for that long and then how did you know that it was time to move on?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:11:35):
I loved working at Asana. And Asana, I think today is incredibly successful, but it was not always obvious that it was going to be incredibly successful. We had some lulls in there. There was a time when we were updating our entire engineering framework from an old version to a new version. And we had like a literal 50% of our engineers working on this. Set aside half of our engineers to work on new features, and the other half was just working on updating this framework. Which meant that we felt like we were moving at half speed. It felt like we were moving really slowly. Customers hated how slow the app was and this framework changed was needed to change that. But we really were not sure that the company was going to be successful.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:12:14):
Staying with the company through those days, it really was this feeling that I was getting good growth opportunities, even if the company itself didn't succeed. One of the things I think was really important for me in my career at Asana and growing into head of product management is, at one point in my career, my manager, one of the co-founders had a meeting with the two co-founders, the planning committee. The planning committee was the two co-founders, the head of engineering and the head of business. And they would meet.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:12:39):
And after these meetings, he would come back to me, my boss, and he'd tell me "Okay, here's the direction we have. Here's what you're going to need to do." And I had to ask some questions and I'd be like, "Well, what about this? And what about this?" After a little bit of time, I would start to be like, "Hey, you have your planning committee today. Here are the three questions I want you to go in and get answered at that committee. And if they say this, I want you to ask this and this."

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:13:01):
And after a little bit of that, I was like, "It might be easier if I just go, I might be able save you some time and some energy if I just joined you." And it was a way that I took myself into this higher level meeting, framing it as something that was going to help out my boss. And it did. It wasn't dishonest, but it was a pretty effective way of advocating to get into this meeting.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:13:19):
I think once I was in the planning committee, I just got a real front row seat to understand how a company is built and what kind of decisions are happening, and what goes on beyond the realm, the narrow perspective of building features. Going from features to strategy, but also understanding business strategy and how do the product choices we make impact our financial plans, and whether or not marketing has to hire people, and whether or not that means we need to open our office.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:13:49):
I really felt like I was getting a lot of personal growth and I was getting an opportunity to learn things that I wouldn't have that opportunity anywhere else. Because of my background and my deep knowledge of this product, that I was able to be exposed to this and have these responsibilities.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:14:06):
For me, I really felt like I was learning and I was growing and I didn't know it all yet. That's really kept me there for a long time. And then I'd say, getting closer to the end of that time, I'd become a manager, I had teams, I've become a manager of managers and I was definitely starting to get burned out. It's really, really tough being a manager. One of the ways that I'd always worked as a product manager is a lot of transparency and authenticity. A lot of explaining to people what our goals are and then showing like "This is the solution I think will hit in our goals, but I'm open to other solutions."

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:14:38):
As a manager, there are times when my goal is backfill for someone I know is quitting in a few weeks, but I can't tell anyone about it. Or there are all these personal secrets that you have to keep for people as a manager. And there are times where, what the person on IT wants is a promotion to make more money, and haven't necessarily earned it yet. And it's not necessarily the right thing to do from a company perspective.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:15:01):
Those places where you're torn between these two goals or what I want, isn't always perfectly aligned with what's best for the people that report to me, that weighed a lot on me. That was very heavy.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:15:12):
I was like, "Okay, maybe I could use a break." But for a while I felt like, "Okay, but I don't want to just leave the company and things be in bad shape." So we worked on hiring lots of really, really stellar people, just really talented people and growing people in their roles. And got to a point where I was like, "Everybody's doing great. They don't need me. They can do fine without me." And I thought about, I just felt this surge of energy thinking, "Yeah. If I left that, I'd be excited for what's next," and then started to have this idea of writing the book on careers. That's how I knew it was time to leave.

**Lenny** (00:15:44):
It was also eight years, so it makes a lot of sense that eventually it gets tiring. And then I love the glimpse you shared into the downsides of being a leader in product. Is there anything more you can add there? Just like, people want to be the head of everything and then they get there and they're like, "Shit. This isn't what I wanted to be doing."

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:16:01):
Definitely. Tooth directions I would say. One is just that being a manager is not as much fun as being an IC. It's a lonely job. When your team goes out for drinks, they treat you differently when you're the manager than when you're one of the other ICs. It's more painful and less fun. For all these reasons, you might not want to be a manager. At the same time, I'm like, "Well, what could I have told younger Jackie, to be like, maybe you don't want to be a manager," and there's nothing. There's nothing you could have told me that would've convinced me not to be a manager. I might say that if you want to try it, consider it a two way door, consider a time that you can try for a while, and if you don't like it, a lot of people are now playing with going back to IC. And also to understand the career paths.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:16:44):
When I started as a product manager, I had no idea what salaries people made, none at all. And I knew I wanted to be able to support a family and stuff when I grew up. So I assumed that I needed to make it to junior VP level to be able to do that. And I just had no idea what salaries were like. Since then, I've looked at levels.fyi, is one of my favorite sites. They'll show you salaries at different levels at different companies.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:17:06):
And if you make it to senior PM, which is one of the middle levels, this middle senior PM level at most of these big companies, you're making as much as a doctor makes, you're making as much as a lawyer makes, you're making a lot of money. You don't necessarily need to climb that career ladder forever to make a lot of money.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:17:24):
And especially at a company like Google, there's a few companies that are known for being the highest paying companies, you can make a lot of money. Much more that you can make in a lot of startups, just by being in IC path, just by continuing to do that job. And companies really need people to do that.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:17:38):
I think understanding that there's different ways to grow your impact and grow your career, other than getting promoted to people management. And for me, I think switching companies is one of the really obvious ways, or teams, of there's one kind of impact you're having at your current job, and maybe you could work on a product that affects more people or has a bigger impact on the people that use it, or something that has more of a social impact type work. But just really thinking about different ways to grow your impact so that you don't make a blind choice towards people management because it seems like it's the only way to grow.

**Lenny** (00:18:05):
Along those lines, I know a lot of companies in theory have these kind of IC career tracks. And I find that it's really rare that they end up being really successful, and very few people end up going down to them. Is that what you see too? Or, I don't know, is there a way to actually be really successful going down that path?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:18:22):
Yeah. I think that to the extent that you want to be seeing promotions as like, you want your level number to go up, I think that it is pretty rare. I think that there's not that many companies that have principal PMs, and the ones that have a bunch usually have a partner PM role above that, that's the real principal PM at other companies.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:18:38):
And the reason for that is that the reason a company would give you that high of a title is because they have a business need for PM who can have as much impact as a director, but with the team that's small enough that they can PM the whole team. And there's only a few problems out there like that. Platform type teams can fill that role a lot of the time. Partnerships, someone who's working on a partnership between two major companies can often fit that kind of description. But there just aren't that many, it's a lot easier to have a big impact if you're a manager of managers and you can add up the impact of all the people on your teams.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:19:10):
So yes, I agree that there's not that many opportunities to go from senior PM to principal PM to partner PM. I don't think you need to. I think that if you want to pursue the IC path, which I think is a great path, I think thinking of ways to grow beyond the official promotion. A lot of companies, you can make a lot of money without getting that promotion title. If you're working at a small company, if you're working with other companies that isn't the highest paying company, you'll make a lot more money by switching companies than you will by getting promoted at your current company.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:19:37):
And like I was saying before, the thinking about the kind of impact your work has, do you want to work on something that's more cutting edge? Do you want to work on something that your product that your friends use? Do you want to work on something that's going to save the environment? All of these things I think are ways to grow. There are a career path that is just not climbing the career ladder.

**Lenny** (00:19:55):
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**Lenny** (00:20:36):
That's a really important insight that you can keep growing, one as a human and maybe even be happier going down one of these other paths, non-manager path. And maybe you don't get the promotions, but maybe you make just as much money as you go the other path. In theory, it's a lot more interesting.

**Lenny** (00:20:50):
And then the other point that you made is really great, that if you want to go down that route, it's probably going to be an infrastructure team or a new business unit, unlikely to be a user facing piece, because they probably want to build a large teams there with a lot of layers. Interesting. Great stuff.

**Lenny** (00:21:04):
Okay. I want to transition to strategy. You've written a lot about strategy. I share your pieces often with folks. Diving into that a little bit, first of all just, can you describe what strategy even is? It's like this term that everyone uses all the time and they're like, "Oh, I'm working on strategy. I'm going to get good at strategy." What is strategy in your mind?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:21:21):
Yeah, when I worked at Google, one of the promotions I went up for, I did not get, and I got the feedback that I needed to be more strategic. I was like, "Okay, great. What does being more strategic mean?" And nobody could tell me. And I was like, "Well, who's more strategic?" And they were like, "Oh, this person used to be really strategic before she became a manager. But now she does just those managery stuff." And I was like, "Okay, I have no role models, no words, nothing to explain what it means to be more strategic." Quick shout-out to my book is, I've got a whole list of what it means to be more strategic. So if you pick that up, you can read through that.

**Lenny** (00:21:51):
Can we find that on Amazon? Where do you find that book?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:21:54):
Yes. Just the Cracking the PM Career, that's on Amazon.

**Lenny** (00:21:57):
Great.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:21:57):
And it's in the strategy chapter.

**Lenny** (00:21:59):
Great.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:22:00):
What I did is I wrote a document on the Local Universal Team, so I called it Local Universal Strategy. And I can't remember what I put in this document. I put it in just random... What my plan was. But once I wrote it down and shared it with people, then I started getting feedback on it. And then I could start to feel my way to what people meant to strategy. Then I get to Asana and I worked really closely with JR, head of product. And I'm starting to get a view of what strategy means, and he's got a robust vision for the product. We talked about this idea that when you're playing guitar, you're left and your right hand know how to work together to play the guitar. Wouldn't it be amazing if at a company, all the teams sort of had that ambient awareness of what other teams were doing together so that you worked seamlessly together?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:22:44):
And Asana was the team brain helping this happen. Imagine a world where you didn't have to have these endless status updates and all this work about work, because the teams knew what each other was doing. And as you kept track of your own task that updated the centralized system, that was always up to date.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:22:59):
We had this vision of what the future could be like. And we had our strategy, which got into this team brain. And what's what a good team brain have? Well, has to always be with you. So we need to have good mobile and good security, needs to know about the different kinds of work that exists. So we need to... Right now, Asana understands this kind of work, we need to add this kind of work.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:23:16):
And it has to help you draw insightful connections with the work that it knows. If we know that you have all these tasks with due dates, we need to be able to let you know that maybe you have too many due dates on next Friday. I started to build up this idea of strategy and I was like, "Okay, I think I've got what strategy is." And a few years later we hire Alex Hood, our new head of product. And he's like, "Can you create a strategy for the platform team?" And I was like, "Great, here it is. We have it." And he's like, "That's not a strategy." And I was like, "What?"

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:23:44):
I was like, "I've been going all these years thinking I knew what strategy was. And now I, again, find out that I don't know it." We had a lot of conversations and figuring out like, "Well what's missing?" And through all of this, I basically realized that there's three key components to strategy. And not everybody's thinking of all three, but if you have all three, you'll have something that counts as a strategy for anyone you talk.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:24:01):
Three parts of strategy are your vision. This is your inspiring picture of what the future looks like. And this is like, "Hey everybody, this is where we want to get to, don't you want to come join me, come build this future with me? Won't this to be exciting?"

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:24:14):
And then you've got your strategic framework. This is where you're saying, "Here is the market we're going after. Here's what success looks like. And here are our big bets on what we think it takes to win that market." That's where you get your pillars, and it's your unique way of breaking down the problem to understand who you're going after and what it takes to win them.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:24:34):
And then the third part is the roadmap. This is where you work backwards from your vision. You say "Okay, I think as a company, we can achieve our vision in five years or 10 years or two years or whatever it is." And you say "Working backwards from that, if we're going to be at our vision in five years, what does that mean we're doing in the intermediate years?" I misunderstood roadmap for the longest time. A roadmap in strategy is not a commitment. Instead, it's a way to double check if your plan makes any sense at all and is even anywhere near feasible. Because what happens to every team I see do these roadmaps, you put it together and you realize "We're not going to hit our vision in five years or 10. This is like a 30 year vision, if we keep going at the pace we're going."

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:25:14):
It's this wake up call to say, "Oh, okay. If we want to hit this vision in five years, we need to start working on that big thing now. We need to take much bigger swings at the bat. We need to say no to a lot more of this optional work. Maybe we need to hire a team that's twice as big."

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:25:31):
It gives you a way to say that probably your strategy did not actually fit into the timeframe that you wanted and that roadmap helps you see like, "Okay, what would it take?" And then that can be a little bit of an organizing factor for people across the company to understand, "Okay, we're having a major launch in two years, then we need to make sure that we're going to have the marketing support we need for that launch. Or we might need to have an entirely different business model in two years. We need to do a fundraising round now." It really helps kind of pull the pieces together.

**Lenny** (00:26:00):
Wow, that's so actionable and easy to understand. I've never heard it describe so simply. Along those lines, say someone creates a strategy, what are signs that it's a good strategy versus a meh strategy? Which should they be looking at?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:26:15):
I'm probably going to write something on this soon. In the past month, I'd actually have two totally different people who came to me with the same problem. And they said, "My CEO brought me a strategy and the strategy is increased revenue by 50%, it's a revenue target number. That doesn't seem like a strategy to me. I don't know what to do." Talking to people, I started to get a deeper sense of what the confusion and the mismatch is here.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:26:40):
I think a good strategy is all about connecting the dots. Connecting the dots from this high level business goal of, "We want to increase revenue by this much" to, "This is the feature we're going to do." And it might have many, many dots in between to help get people from one to the other of like "Given that this is our big picture of view of what we're doing, what's the next step? And what's the next step? And what's the next step?"

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:27:02):
"As product managers, if you're given a numerical target, that is not a complete strategy, but it's your job now as a product manager to take all of the great product work you've been doing. Let's say you've been doing lots of customer research and you're getting really deep into what the customer pains are and what their needs are. It's your job to take the things you've got now in your mind, you've got a list of maybe 20 different things your product team could work on. It's your job to take those things you want to work on and the reasons why you think they're important, and match them up against what that larger financial target was or whatever strategy or vision you're getting from the executives. And basically see "Which of these feature work? Which of this product work that I want to do best matches up with those goals and why?"

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:27:45):
And there's probably a few more missing dots in there. You're like, "Well, I think that this is going to make us the most money. But why? I think this will make us the most money because it's helping us get more money from our current users. And we think it's going to be really hard to win new users because we're already pretty saturated in the market."

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:28:01):
That's where you start to get into strategy, that level of detail. And then you say, "Okay, given that we think it's more strategic to get more money from our current users, here's one thing we could do. What are other things we could do? And how do those stack up against each other? Or maybe it should be that 50% of our effort is on getting more money from our current users, and 50% is from going into new markets. Well, which new markets do we think are most promising and what would it take to win those new markets?"

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:28:24):
I think it's that connecting the dots. And the only way you find out what dots are missing is by talking to people and communicating your strategy and communicating it again and again, and really listening for people's confusion. Because people will try to hide their confusion. They won't get your strategy, there's going to be some assumption that you're making that they are not making. So you have to pay really, really close attention to find those missing assumptions so that you can then explain why this connects to this.

**Lenny** (00:28:51):
That's really good advice of just looking for confusion and that points out where your strategy is lacking. How could PMs get better at strategy at doing this than getting better at this activity? Advice for that?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:29:02):
Yeah. Strategy really should be collaborative work. I think that there's some amount to which the PM should go off by themselves and think about what strategy they want and have that in their back pocket, because that way you actually can contribute to the conversation, but real strategy should be very collaborative.

I think the best way to learn and improve your strategy, one of them is going to be working with the other stakeholders and listening to their feedback and understanding what do they agree with or not agree with. Sometimes it's as easy as a conversation. I can't remember the details here, but there was one conversation on pricing models that we were talking about, and we were each going to go around the room and talk about which of the five pricing models did we think was best. And I think I was like, "Number three is most [inaudible 00:29:44] number two."

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:29:44):
And then our CEO gets, and he's like, "I think really number four is the only reasonable one for these reasons." And I was just like, "I agree, I've changed a mind. You're right. You just saw it in a way that I hadn't seen."

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:29:58):
This accumulation of experiences, I think matter so much for strategy, for data analysis, all of these things where... I'm really, really good at data analysis, but only because I've seen so many experiments that when I see a set of results, I can just instantly remember like four similar experiments and what the conclusion was and what went wrong with it. And so I'll be like, "Oh yes, this metric is up. But if you check this metric, you can see it's down, which means that it might be this conclusion." It's talking to people, listening to them, that builds it up a lot. But that's one half of it, because you can't always just learn something by a bunch of leaders sitting in a room talking to each other.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:30:37):
I think seeing things through to a certain amount of time really does help. And I think sticking with the team for long enough to be able to measure the results of what you did and ideally iterate, like being one doing it for eight years, I got to try something and then try something different and then try something different. And I got to really notice the patterns and test what works and what didn't and form those conclusions. I think that sticking around long enough to see your results and especially try something else different and see those results, I think can make a big difference.

**Lenny** (00:31:06):
What I'm hearing is you get better one doing it over and over and over to being in the conversations and learning from people directly. Is there anything else that someone that, I don't know, doesn't have a lot of these experiences yet and in the room for these sorts of things that they could maybe study up on or practice just outside of this to get a little bit stronger in strategy?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:31:27):
Yeah. Definitely there's a lot of cross applying of strategy that I think that really is helpful. One of the great ways to learn strategy is to cross apply strategy from other places. One of the people I interviewed for my book was to Shishir Mehrotra, who's CEO of Coda, and he used to work at YouTube. And while he was at YouTube, he had a very big strategic question that the team had to decide about whether if you search for a video that is not on YouTube, but is somewhere else like Hulu, should you link them out to that?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:32:00):
And the team was having a lot of trouble making any progress on that. But one day he went to a product review for Google shopping, totally different product, shopping versus videos. But they were having a similar issue and they talked about this idea of consistency versus comprehensiveness.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:32:16):
They said "Is our product the kind of product where it's better to have consistent results all the time? Like every time you click on a result, it takes you to a Google shopping result or is it better to have comprehensiveness where even though the experience will be different each time we give you a result every time?" That framing, he was able to take from shopping over to YouTube and ask that same question and the answer didn't have to be the same, but it gave them a new way of looking at the strategy that he was able to use.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:32:40):
I think having that broad view and looking at lots of other products and seeing how they make their choices and how do they frame their decisions, that's a good way to improve strategy.

**Lenny** (00:32:49):
That's a really good reminder of eigenquestions as a framework. I think if you Google eingenquestions, you can find it and I'll try to link it to it in this podcast. And Shishir has a lot of great stuff that he's put out there. Good call out.

**Lenny** (00:33:01):
Let me ask one more quick question on strategy and then I want to move on to career stuff. How long should people, I guess, early PMs maybe, how much time should they spend on strategy development? And then, when does it make sense to start investing in that?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:33:15):
Yeah. I think that for your first six months on a product, probably don't worry about strategy. For your six months really, you should be talking to customers, researching your product stuff. Really starting off by saying, "I'm going to learn the strategy, whatever strategy my company already has, and I'm going to do my research, but I'm going to deliver on that strategy."

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:33:33):
But all this time, while you're doing your regular product work, so you're visiting customers and you're analyzing data and all these things, you are probably having ideas pop up in your mind. You're starting to notice trends. You're starting to notice what are the pain points people have and just stay open to that. And after about six months, I think is when you can start to put together a draft of a strategy for your own team.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:33:53):
I think you can take half a day. Just block it off, don't take any meetings, put on your headphones, go to a coffee shop, whatever it is you do to get your alone time. And just work on whichever of those three pillars of strategy, whether it's the vision, the strategic framework or the roadmap. Start with whichever one draws you the most and start writing some stuff down, just start getting your ideas out there.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:34:14):
And this will start to give you that framework, you can then go try to take that time, fill it out more, figure out what questions you have, what would you need to know to decide which of these approaches is better, what are the open questions you have. And then you can have something to start meeting with the rest of your product triad. The engineering lead, the design lead, any other key stakeholders you have on your team, and just start working with them and start to figure out how are we feeling about our strategy.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:34:39):
One thing I love to look for is repeated disagreements, "Are there any times when we're fighting over whether to add this feature? And I so strongly believe we shouldn't and you so strongly believe we should," and it's just ends up feeling like a battle of wills. Anytime you have these disagreements that feel really torny or they feel like a disagreement in values, that's a sign that really have a disagreement in strategy and that it's worth it to write down what your strategic framework is or what your strategic principle is and address the problem at that level, rather than fighting over individual features or individual decisions.

**Lenny** (00:35:11):
It's such a good tactical tip of just like, if there's continued disagreement, that's a sign, you either craft a strategy or maybe a principle which are related, but sometimes different, just principles of the product or principles of the team. Great advice. And the point you made about not spending the first six months on strategy, I love that because a lot of PMs come in are like, "Oh, strategy. I'm going to figure everything out. I'm going to tell us how to build this thing. This all sucks. Everything you all have done before." Just that rule of thumb, of not allowing yourself to invest deeply there for six months. Love that idea.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:35:42):
Nice. Yeah. I think as a manager, you usually have a reason for hiring someone. And usually at least in your head, you think you've hired them to build on the strategy that you've already created, and there will be room for people to create new strategies and change the strategy. But if they come in on day one saying your strategy is all wrong, raises the question of, "Well then why did you join my team if you didn't believe in my strategy?"

**Lenny** (00:36:06):
A lot of times people just want you to help them execute. They're just like, "Come on. We know what we're doing. Just help us ship this thing and it's going to be great." And a lot of people come in like "No, let's just rethink it all. Let's take a step back."

**Lenny** (00:36:17):
Okay. Last area that I want to spend some time on is around career. Career growth as a product manager and product leader. Luckily you wrote a book called Cracking the PM Career. If you just had to boil down the best advice from the book to one suggestion to a PM, let's say starting off in their career and then maybe a mid-career, what would that be?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:36:41):
I'll start with one piece of suggestion for people at any stage of their career, which is to have a conversation with your manager and say, "I would really like at some point in the future to grow into whatever this goal is," whether it's to become a people manager, become a senior PM, become a director, whatever this next step of what you want is. "I would really love to become a people manager someday. What do you suggest that I work on now so that I'll be ready when the opportunity comes up?"

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:37:03):
The reason I love this template is just a really easy way to start off this conversation of saying "Here's my goal, by the way. I do want to get promoted, I do want to grow, I want to become a senior PM," whatever that next step is.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:37:14):
I'm framing it in the future so that it's not threatening. It's not like going to put my manager on the defensive and be like, "You're not ready to be a manager yet. I don't have to prove why you're not ready for that promotion yet." Which is not the mindset you want your manager in.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:37:26):
And then it brings them onto your side. "Can you help me out here? Let's you and me work together to get me this promotion. You and me work together to get me ready there." It brings them in onto your side, so now they'll be in the mindset of trying to help you. It will target the feedback that you get on what you need to do to get that promotion. Because so much of the time, I think the reason that success as a PM is hard is because you get a gazillion pieces of feedback.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:37:50):
They're all true. It's all like "Yeah. In that meeting, you said a lot of filler words." But that's not the thing that's actually holding you back from the next promotion, or it's not the thing that you actually need to improve at to get to that next step.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:38:01):
Being able to focus the feedback you get on what you're trying to achieve, makes a huge difference and will really help make sure that you get that feedback. And at any company, either your manager is going to be the person who decides if you get that promotion, what they say is just true, whatever they think you're missing is what you're missing, or there's going to be a committee. And if there's a committee, your manager's feedback matters a lot. And also if they've been at the company a while, they'll know what they look for.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:38:26):
If you have a new manager at a big company that uses promotion by committee, at any big company, make friends with your manager's peers, find someone who's been at the company a while, who's gotten someone to promoted and ask them that same question. Get them onto your side to get you the experience and the improvements you need to get that promotion.

**Lenny** (00:38:41):
Amazing advice. I found that to be super helpful myself. And you're saying that applies to every role. UPMs, everybody.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:38:48):
Yeah. I think you can use that in almost any role because everybody does have different gaps, but then to go into early career people, I think that working at a large company early in your career can be just really, really valuable. If you choose a small company and what's going to be super successful and you pick the winner, that can be better than working at a big company. But big or, I'd say, even medium size companies can be really good here.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:39:10):
But a company where you're going to be able to learn best practices, you're going to be able to grow your network, I think that these large companies really give you... And you'll also be able to make usually a higher salary that starts to build your nest egg, I think that that gives you a really good foundation for anything else you want to do later in your career.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:39:27):
And when you're early in the career, really to have that mindset of absorbing and learning how to be a great PM. One mistake I see people make early in their career is they are trying to overdo it. They've been given some project, usually as a early career person, you get assigned a pretty narrow scoped constrained problem. They're like, "Hey, can you make the print dialogue for our product?" And the right answer to these narrowly scope defined products is not to invent a whole new print dialogue.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:39:56):
A lot of times you've been assigned a problem where a huge creative solution is a bad idea. If you're in one of the situations, just do the simple thing, get it done really well. And that'll earn you the trust to be able to take on bigger things in the future, but you don't need to be outstanding to make it past the APM promotions. You just need to be doing a solid, good job. And later in your career, there's a lot more room for being outstanding.

**Lenny** (00:40:20):
What are some of the most common mistakes that PMs make early on in their career that hurt their career?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:40:25):
Yeah. A lot of it is misunderstanding what the role is at different stages in the career and misunderstanding what success looks like. This can show up in a lot of different ways. One of them is, there's lots of APMs who want to become people managers right away, and they poo poo all the regular everyday work you need to do to be a good PM. And that comes across to a manager as immature, certainly, but also just like you don't seem to understand or value what good PMing is, so I certainly wouldn't make you a manager. But also now it's a little hard to convince you to do your day to day job, which makes you a little hard to manage, which might mean put a little bit less of my energy into managing you. It ends up being a bad situation for people.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:41:08):
It's a lot better to show some enthusiasm for the job you're supposed to be doing right now. Other ways that can work is just people optimizing for the wrong things, like leaning in too much or too little. On PMs I see get paired with a really strong designer and you let your designer take the lead on everything. And now you just sit back and you're a note taker and you're not contributing anything. You're not really driving anything. You're not adding your own ideas and making the team better.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:41:31):
That person needs to step up more, to be somebody who's really contributing and adding and being a multiplier on the work of everybody else on their team. And then some people step too much. They're trying to lead everything and they're crowding people out and they're not giving their engineers a chance to present at all hands, and they're burning bridges with their coworkers. And almost every company peer reviews is a huge part of your review cycle. And as a product manager, you need to get along well with the other people in your team. You'll be pushing them and encouraging them to get more done than they would've otherwise, but you don't want to do this by having everybody say, "I never want to work with her again."

**Lenny** (00:42:06):
So much of advice I find for early careers, it's just like it should done, make impact, just your job, don't overthink it, if it won't earn your right to move up and take on more responsibility, get promoted on all kind of stuff. I love that so much. It's just do the work, just be quiet, do the work, it's going to go great.

**Lenny** (00:42:23):
A couple more questions. And before we get to a lightning round. You've exited the PM career path at this point, and I'm curious what made you decide to go in a different direction? And then just, what's next? what's next for Jackie Bavaro?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:42:35):
Yeah. I'm not sure that I've exited the PM career path. I really like working in offices with people. I've been waiting for an end to the remote work era. And once I find companies that are in person again, I'm definitely have some curiosity about that. I might go back to in person work.

**Lenny** (00:42:51):
Oh my God. I'm imagining your LinkedIn is about exploding right now, as people are listening to this.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:42:57):
I'm in San Francisco.

**Lenny** (00:42:59):
Oh boy. And then were you going to say something else?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:43:02):
Nothing is settled, but I've been playing around with the idea about whether or not to update the Cracking the PM Interview book. Lots changed. Some of the companies there are not the top companies anymore. Some top companies aren't in there, some of the companies have changed their interview processes. I think that could be a lot of fun to get that more up to date. Some of the changes that have happened in interviews over the past years.

**Lenny** (00:43:21):
Amazing. I imagine many people will be very excited to see a second edition of Correcting the PM Interview. Okay. Let us get to our lightning round. Okay. I'm just going to ask six questions and just tell me whatever comes to mind as we go through them, real quick. And maybe we'll pull out a thread or two as we go through it. Are you ready?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:43:39):
Yes.

**Lenny** (00:43:40):
Okay. What's a book that you recommend most to other product managers other than your book?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:43:45):
I love Getting Things Done by David Allen.

**Lenny** (00:43:47):
Ooh, okay. Around productivity. I love that book. That was really transformative for me when I read it many years ago, and I still use a couple of this points. Awesome. Okay. Getting Things Done, David Allen. Other than Asana, what's a company that you recommend to PMs that are looking for a new gig? What are some companies that you're excited about, potentially?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:44:06):
I'm not the most up to date with all of the companies, but I do think that Microsoft is pretty underrated. I had a lot of fun working at Microsoft. I learned a lot of good strategy there. I think I got a really good foundation for a lot of the rest of my career.

**Lenny** (00:44:19):
Contrarian pick and they've been killing it. That makes a lot of sense. Good choice. What's a favorite app right now for you?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:44:25):
I have a recipe manager called Paprika. I really like it.

**Lenny** (00:44:30):
Ooh. Does it have actual recipes or is it track other recipes you've found?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:44:34):
It tracks other recipes. You can save any URL and it'll extract the recipe from there and you can do meal planning in there. You can turn things into a shopping list. You can use it across your phone and your computer for when you want to sit down and browse. But I really enjoy just browsing recipes and a lot of them I'll never cook, but just the idea that, "Oh, I could imagine cooking that," it's a lot of fun. It's a little bit like traveling.

**Lenny** (00:44:58):
Wow. You could say Paprika. Okay. And then who's someone that you love to follow on Twitter or Instagram currently that maybe people haven't heard of? Or maybe they have.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:45:06):
I love Helen Rosner, @hels, H-E-L-S. She's a food writer for the New Yorker, but it's a lot deeper than food. A lot of it gets into society and bigger topics.

**Lenny** (00:45:19):
Wow. I see a pattern here around food. Who's your favorite manager that you've had?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:45:23):
I think it's probably JR at Asana who I worked for gazillion years.

**Lenny** (00:45:28):
Any particular reason why?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:45:29):
I think there's got to be a match between you and your manager. And I think that we had a lot of mutual respect, and I think that I was really lucky in that he was absolutely amazing at vision. I was able to learn a lot from it from him. And there were a lot of places where I was able to help. A lot of my early experience of even getting to learn strategy and vision he was like, "Jackie, can you help me with the slides for the vision all hands?"

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:45:54):
And I would be doing busy work of putting the slides together, but then I could make some suggestions, I could ask some questions. And first year I was just basically doing slides. Second year, I had a little bit of shaping. Third year, he let me take the first stab at it and then he reviewed it. I think he was always willing to help me grow and really saw it as a win-win where if I grew into something, then that would free up his time to take on something bigger and better.

**Lenny** (00:46:20):
Awesome. Sounds like an awesome manager. And then last but not least, what's a favorite interview question that you love to use?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:46:26):
I love to ask, "Tell me about a recent project that you're proud of." I feel like a lot of interviews don't give people enough chance to shine, to talk about something that they did really, really well and hear about what made it so good and what are they proud of, and how did they achieve those amazing results.

**Lenny** (00:46:46):
And then what do you look for in an answer there? What are a couple bullet points of a good answer to that?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:46:46):
It's so different for every question, but I'm definitely looking for try to get something recent, so I want them to be something that matches the level that they're applying for. There's going to be a really big difference between the way that an APM answers this question and the way that a director of PM answers the question. I look to see how did they think about strategy, what was their judgment on different choices, what was hard. I have a framework for this. The pearl framework for answering questions like this is problem, epiphany, action, result and learning.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:47:15):
It's a little bit like the star framework, but I want it all like, "What's the problem that you thought was worth solving, a problem that I think is big enough? What's your epiphany? What's the insight that you had? Do you notice something that nobody else did and how valuable was it?"

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:47:28):
A lot of times that's what makes these PM stories so interesting. Is that meeting with customers, head on and they said one weird word and you dug into it and you learn this whole new customer need that no one else had seen before. And then there's going to be the action. Like "What did you actually do to make this happen? And was it hard?" Because usually it is hard, but understanding the ways in which it's hard and how you overcame each of those challenges. And then obviously a PM should care about results and the thing they pick that they're proud of should have good results or have at least results that they learned from.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:48:00):
And then, yeah, that last part of learning. "Did you grow from this?" Especially if it's a failure, which is lots of people love to talk about the products that failed or sometimes the interviewer asks them to talk about a product that fails, but I don't want them to leave it at "Yeah. It was a big loss. Our company lost $50 million and we couldn't get it back," but then you want to say like, "Okay, but what I learned from that is now I need to always run a load test on a staging server and then I've had many successful launches since then that we didn't have that same problem in."

**Lenny** (00:48:29):
Wow. What a fruitful lightning round. So many nuggets. We got a new framework in there too. Okay. Where can folks find you online and then any last words of wisdom?

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:48:38):
Yeah. I'm on Twitter, @jackiebo. I'm on Twitter all the time. Send me a message, I'll probably see it pretty fast.

**Lenny** (00:48:44):
Amazing. Thank you so much for being here, Jackie.

**Jackie Bavaro** (00:48:46):
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Great conversation.

**Lenny** (00:48:49):
That was awesome. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the chat, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You could also learn more at lennyspodcast.com. I'll see you in the next episode.

---

## [5/8] Gibson Biddle on his DHM product strategy framework, GEM roadmap prioritization framework, 5 Netflix strategy mini case studies, building a personal board of directors, and much more

**Lenny** (00:00:04):
Gibson Biddle, whose name is really fun to say, by the way, has directly taught and worked with more PMs than only a handful of other people in the world. Before going full time on teaching, he was VP of product at Netflix and at Chegg, and has written what is almost surely the most popular Medium post on product strategy.

**Lenny** (00:00:21):
In our chat, we learned about Gibson's very popular product strategy and prioritization framework, and we go through a bunch of real life case studies from his time in Netflix to see how they apply in the real world. I love how Gibson comes up with such clear and memorable frameworks, which help demystify the vagueness that surround strategy and prioritization. We're really lucky to have Gibson share these with us, and I hope you enjoy it.

**Lenny** (00:00:45):
This episode is brought to you by Flat File. Think the last time imported a spreadsheet. Did it work the first time? Chances are it did not. You probably got some weird error, had to try a bunch of things like removing the blank title rows above your column headers, or Googling how to save with UTF-8 encoding. What even is UTF? Who cares? You're just trying to get your file where it needs to go so you can do your actual job.

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**Lenny** (00:01:50):
This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda is an all in one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing. It's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers, and it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast.

**Lenny** (00:02:15):
Over the years I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life, with an incredibly rich collection of templates and guides in the Coda doc gallery, including resources for many guests on this podcast, including Shreyas, Gokul, and Shishir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there, like Pinterest, Spotify, Square and Uber, use Koda to run effectively and have published their templates for anyone to use.

**Lenny** (00:02:43):
If you're ping ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special limited time offer just for startups. Head over to Coda.io/Lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollar credit on your first statement. That's C-O-D-A.io/Lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollars in credit on your account.

**Lenny** (00:03:14):
Gibson, I am so excited to be doing this. We've collaborated on some writing. We've done a couple of fireside chats together, but we've never really dug deep into anything, and so I'm really excited for this opportunity to chat. So, welcome.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:03:27):
Great, Lenny. Thanks for having me. It's fun to virtually be in the same place at the same time. Someday we'll do that in person.

**Lenny** (00:03:35):
Oh man, I can't wait. For folks that aren't that familiar with you, could you just share a very brief overview of your journey through product?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:03:43):
It's hard, because I'm older than dirt, to be very brief, but I'll give my best shot. The intro was, I discovered I loved teaching early. I ran a sailing school, took a year off from college. That was my first startup. And then, the three chapters of my life. The first one was in marketing, so I actually started in the mail room at an ad agency, and then went into account services and created a service that helped name new companies and products, like if you're in the Bay Area, the Versatel, or the Versateller, it's a Bank of America name.

**Lenny** (00:04:10):
I've always been so curious about that industry, but that's a discussion for another time.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:04:14):
Oh yeah, well, we can come around to that. But at the end of the day, it's all about packaging and positioning and branding. And so, I was curious about that. I got good at it. And then, I lived in Silicon Valley, and I wanted to go into tech, and so I decided to go back to business school, and I went back to Tuck, which is at Dartmouth. It's the only ski... it's the only business school that has its own ski area, which is why I went there. It's in Hanover, New Hampshire.

**Lenny** (00:04:35):
Okay, that feels like a product market fit for Gibson.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:04:37):
Exactly. And then, after the school, this is the tech journey, I joined Electronic Arts. Punk kid in the right place at the right time. I joined in marketing, and then I switched over to product. It was a great place to learn product. They called it Producer College. I learned a ton, and my first startup was actually a joint venture between Electronic Arts and Disney. We created what's called EA Kits at the beginning, and that became Creative Wonders, and we sold that company to Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank. He was the CEO of the Learning Company that made Reader Rabbit software and Oregon Trails. That dates me, because most of the listeners have probably played Oregon Trails as a kid.

**Lenny** (00:05:13):
Dying of dysentery. That's what I remember.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:05:15):
Yeah, yeah. And so, the product roles I grew up into, I call it a muckety muck, but a VP of product or a chief product officer. Joined Netflix in 2005. I left out some failed startups. That's important. It's important to let folks know I had some failed startups, but you can gloss over in the brief version. Netflix 2005, and then 2010 I went back to my heart, which is teaching. Chegg was a textbook rental and homework help company. It continues to exist. We took that public sort of 2014.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:05:44):
And then, last five years I stopped direct deposit, and I'm really back to the coda in my career. I'm back to teaching, which I really love to do. So I do talks, workshops all over the world. I do more writing, which really saves my voice, and then experiment with different ways to really try to be helpful to product leaders around the world.

**Lenny** (00:06:02):
Awesome. We're going to be spending time digging into some of that stuff. Did you describe this point in your career as stopping direct deposit?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:06:08):
I did.

**Lenny** (00:06:09):
That's amazing. Wow. I've never heard it that way.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:06:14):
At least you understood that.

**Lenny** (00:06:15):
I totally get that. Amazing. So, a question I ask folks in your line of work especially is, how many PMs would you say you've helped train, free workshops and advising and online courses, and anything else you've done?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:06:28):
I thought it was going to be a, how many PMs does it take to screw in a light bulb? I thought it was going to be a joke. Yeah, yeah. Okay, my SWAG. SWAG is a stupid wild-ass guess, important idea. So, my guess is, in real life I've worked with product leaders where I was in the building with them. It would be like 500 to 1000. When I would manage an organization, there might be 200 or 300 people in it. So, that's in real life.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:06:53):
The next one would be via talks, workshops, newsletter. That's probably, I kind of can SWAG my way into that. Probably 50 to 100,000 a year. The reason I sort of know, I'm a feedback freak, so there's a Survey Monkey at the end of everything I do. So for instance, every morning I wake up, it's always feedback for the same talk. I did a Branding for Builders talk for Product School and there'll be like 10 surveys. I've got like 6,000 surveys for that. They're all watching and recording. My guess is, that means like 60,000 people have watched that one video, for instance.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:07:26):
Anyways, and then lifetime, it's probably getting into 500,000 to a million. So, that's my SWAG. I could be 2X wrong on either side.

**Lenny** (00:07:34):
Okay, a million, potentially.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:07:36):
Well, your number's bigger. You could just go off of, what, 115,000 subscribers your newsletter?

**Lenny** (00:07:43):
Yeah.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:07:44):
You're getting to a billion, Lenny. You're going to get to the next level. 500 million to a billion.

**Lenny** (00:07:49):
I feel like the level that you've helped PMs is at a deeper level for most of the folks, especially the courses you've done and things like that. So, it's a little hard to compare. But anyway, that's really impressive, and I feel like when I ask people this question, I feel like this is going to be a high bar to meet.

**Lenny** (00:08:04):
So, I'm excited to dig into a lot of the stuff that you've learned along this journey. Maybe the area you spend most of your time on is helping PMs build their product strategy, muscle through your workshops, and you have these legendary Medium posts about product strategy. So, I'd love to spend the majority of our time talking through just helping people build this muscle. And maybe just start, you have this really simple model for describing what product strategy should be for companies: to delight customers in hard to copy margin enhancing ways. So, there's kind of these three parts, customers, hard to copy, margin enhancing. I'd love to just kind of hear your take on each of these three parts, how you came up with this, and then maybe a story or two of how you relied on this and used this at Netflix.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:08:42):
Sure. You got the model right. And I mean, the short answer is, I definitely learned it from Reed Hastings when I started at Netflix. Actually, he did a reference check to a friend of mine, checking up on me, and the only question he asked my pal, whose name is John Daz, was, "Hey, John, is Gib ready? Can Gib delight customers?" That was the only question he asked in the reference check.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:09:05):
Luckily, I built really delightful kids software. Back then, people were talking about satisfying customers, listening carefully, understanding them, et cetera. And the delight, it just said, no, no, no. The job is to delight customers. Like Peter Thiel, his book, From Zero to One. The job of an entrepreneur at the beginning is just to find out something that's 10X better. Delight is trying to work in that magnitude.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:09:28):
The hard to copy part, definitely I learned that. I had a product leader who worked for me, his name was HB Mock. He was focused on the non-member page. That's where people sign up for. They put in their email, their credit card, they would get a free trial. He'd looked like crap, like everything at startups sucks at the beginning, but he put a happy family on the couch on this screen, and that's where you put in your email. And that got a lot more people engaged. And so, it delighted customers, but it was helping to build the business, because more folks were setting up for a free trial.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:09:58):
I'm like, that's great HB, but I'll bet my paycheck that within a week, Blockbuster's going to put a happy family on their couch, too. And this is the problem of doing things that are easy to copy. So in the long term, if you can delight customers and create hard to copy advantage, things are just a lot better.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:10:17):
And so the last phrase, margin enhancement, that's just a fancy phrase for making money. Margin technically would mean profit. I just gave you example with that non-member page, with the happy family on the couch. It delights folks, it helps build a better business, but in that case, Blockbuster was able to copy it.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:10:37):
So, that's the model. The hardest part in that model is, how do you balance delight versus margin? So if Netflix said, hey, everybody, you're paying $20 bucks a day, but you're going to get exactly the same service tomorrow for $5 bucks a month, you'd be just like, this is fricking awesome. You'd be really delighted. But Netflix would not, the business wouldn't work.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:10:56):
So, one of the first places we sort of experiment on how to evaluate trade offs between delight and margin, in the old days, Netflix was a DVD by mail company, and if you ask customers what they wanted, then they all said the same thing. I want my new release DVDs faster, right? Back then, most customers would have to wait a week or two or four weeks. Back then, a movie came out in the theater, two months later it came out on DVD. We just couldn't afford to buy for that initial demand. So, the way it worked was, some people got it the next day in the mail, and some people had to wait two months.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:11:31):
And so, the A/B test we set up, we said, okay, everybody says they want this, in focus groups and qualitative and surveys. Well, let's A/B test and see what we really learn. So, the AB test was called the Perfect New Release Test. Imagine we're at about a million customers circa 2005. 10,000 peeps are in a test cell. They get their new release DVD the next day in the mail. Awesome, right? And the control gets it whenever. Let's say, average maybe two weeks later.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:12:01):
And so, the way we measure delight in this A/B test is, will you improve retention for the folks that are getting their DVD the next day in the mail? That's how we measured, it was retention. When Netflix started, it was like 10% canceled every month. 2005, it was about four and a half percent canceled every month. Today it's about 2% cancel every month. So, I'll just put it back to you. Do you think, when we looked at the AB test results... By the way, you can't get this wrong, Lenny, so just relax.

**Lenny** (00:12:35):
Excellent.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:12:35):
Do you think the Perfect New Release Experience improved retention?

**Lenny** (00:12:40):
My guess is, because you're telling this story, it's going to be a surprise, and I would guess that it did not.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:12:45):
Okay, so your guess is we won't see an improvement in retention. And I'm guessing people listening to us right now, there's going to be some folks that, oh, shit, yes, that's what everybody's asking for. Of course we should deliver it to them, right? Well, in this case, both right, right? We saw a very small change in retention. That was the surprise. And so, it went from something like 4.5% canceled in the control. It was 4.45. Very small change. We can measure it.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:13:13):
And so, now you get in the math of delight versus margin. If you push this out to all million customers, you would essentially save 5,000 customers. And so, what's the value in saving 5,000 customers? The way we valued it, we said, well we've got 5,000 customers. The lifetime value of a customer then was a hundred bucks. And then we multiplied it by two, which is our word of mouth factor. So our theory was, if you loved it, Lenny, you'd tell your friends about it, you'd rave about it, and you'd bring in one other customer for free into Netflix. And so, we used this 2X word of mouth factor. And so if you do that math, it was worth about a million bucks to us as a company.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:13:52):
So now you get into, okay, what's the cost of that additional inventory? And the answer was $5 million bucks. So on one hand, you're bringing in a million bucks of value by retaining more customers, but you're spending $5 million more, so it doesn't seem to make sense.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:14:06):
Okay, so easy question. I don't overthink this one, Lenny. Would you roll this out to all customers?

**Lenny** (00:14:10):
I would not.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:14:11):
You would not. Okay. Can you help build an argument for somebody who would choose to roll it out?

**Lenny** (00:14:17):
Oh, no. Give me the hint. I'll take it.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:14:18):
The hint was, there was an assumption in my formula. I said 5,000 customers times $100 bucks lifetime value, times a 2X word of mouth. So the argument for why somebody might do it, they disagree with the 2X word of mouth, and what the algorithm is.

**Lenny** (00:14:33):
Yeah, I see where this is going. Basically, the experience is so much better that word of mouth increases. It's so delightful.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:14:38):
Yeah. Amazon would use a 10X, right? And so, sort of a wash there. You'd probably lean forward and do it. We actually worked hard to try to isolate what that word of mouth factor was. It was really frustrating. And then, the reality was, Barry McCarthy was the CFO. He was apoplectic about the idea of using a 2X, because it means you'll invest more in building a better product. If you let the product team use 10x, Barry's like, "We don't have the money. We don't have the money to spend $5 million on DVDs."

**Gibson Biddle** (00:15:03):
Anyways, this is where we sort of refined our thinking about the model of delighting customers in hard to copy, margin enhancing ways. Pop quiz, I know the answer, Lenny, but want everybody else thinking about it. What makes Netflix hard to copy?

**Lenny** (00:15:18):
The licensing deals and content that they're creating.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:15:22):
Original content, yeah. Keep going.

**Lenny** (00:15:24):
Their brand that they've built over time.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:15:26):
You trust them with their credit card every month for $20 bucks, right?

**Lenny** (00:15:28):
Oh, absolutely. I think I've been a customer for five years.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:15:31):
Yeah, yeah. What else makes them hard to copy?

**Lenny** (00:15:34):
I imagine, their tech that used to be the ranking algorithm recommendation engine.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:15:37):
Yeah, so there's unique technology. Personalization is a great example. You just brought that up. There's only one other idea that I think is... Well, there's probably be two others for Netflix. So keep going, dig deep.

**Lenny** (00:15:48):
Maybe, I don't know if this is an answer you're thinking, but just the talent they've built up over time is probably something.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:15:53):
That's really interesting. People go to culture, and then I sort of specify, what makes the Netflix product hard to copy? So, I won't allow that one.

**Lenny** (00:16:01):
Oh, man.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:16:02):
Okay, keep going.

**Lenny** (00:16:03):
What makes Netflix hard to copy?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:16:05):
I'll give you one clue.

**Lenny** (00:16:06):
Okay.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:16:06):
What made Facebook wicked hard to copy?

**Lenny** (00:16:08):
Their network effects and growth loops.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:16:12):
Yeah, yeah. We actually tried to experiment with friends and social, getting movie ideas from your friends. The idea is, your friends were on the network, you wouldn't want to leave. And you'd also get great movie ideas. By the way, that was a failed hypothesis.

**Lenny** (00:16:25):
Right, I was just going to say, I remember that did not work out. I don't see it anywhere.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:16:28):
Yeah. It did not work out. Yeah, I guess we could make an argument today, every screen in the world is magically prewired so you can watch Netflix anytime, anywhere. There's sort of a kind of flywheel or network effect at work. But anyways, that's great. So, that's just a model. But I have found that model to be helpful in my thinking a bunch of times.

**Lenny** (00:16:44):
There's a couple things I wanted to follow up on there, because there's a lot there. One is this idea of testing the ideal almost, and kind of working backwards from that. That's something I always find found really helpful. Is that something that you espouse and find to be really powerful?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:16:58):
Honestly, I think of these product strategies as these high level theories, these hypotheses about how you will delight customers in hard to copy, margin enhancing ways. I just gave a failed hypothesis, the social one. You actually brought up a winning hypothesis. Personalization delights customers, because it makes it easier to find movies you'll love. It's hard to copy. Netflix sort of knows the movie tastes of a billion people worldwide. That's 222 members times about five profiles per. And then the margin, this is an interesting one.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:17:27):
When Netflix is making an investment in a TV show or movie, they kind of can guess how many people will watch it. So, they guessed that 100 million people would watch Stranger Things, so they were willing to invest $500 million. They guessed that 20 million people would watch BoJack Horseman, I'm a freak, so they're willing to make $100 million. I call that right sizing the investment, but that's how personalization helps Netflix to build margin, or to build a better business.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:17:54):
Anyways, back to your original question. I mainly was just trying to find these high level theories and hypotheses that I hoped would delight in hard to copy, margin enhancing ways. The reality was, we'd have 10 ideas and probably six of them would fail, but a lot of value in the three or the four that worked.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:18:10):
When we went to TV based systems, we actually couldn't A/B test at first, so we were going back to qual and they were looking over people's shoulders, and focus groups, et cetera. But eventually, Netflix could A/B test what's a good experience on a TV based system. They have server based systems now where they can create different experiences for different folks. So I guess my short answer was, so hard to find these product strategies that worked. There was no notion of building a perfect experience of all these things together, so we just took it one theory at a time.

**Lenny** (00:18:40):
Got it. And then, on that concept of delight, I always wanted to ask you this question. I've never had a chance. For B2B, do you find this is also something companies should really prioritize and do? Because not a lot of B2B products are delightful, and a lot of them are still really successful. How do you think about that kind of framework in B2B?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:18:55):
Okay, first, I think that most all of the frameworks I use work for both consumer and B2B. Personally, I've spent my whole career on consumer. The thing about consumer is, you're sort of trying to catch lightning in a bottle, right? Where enterprise, you can actually walk into it a little bit more thoughtfully. You can always find your first customers, et cetera.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:19:15):
Anyways, I was thinking about what's different. For instance, one of the hard to copy advantages of B2B is switching costs, right? I didn't bring that up in the context of Netflix. It's wicked hard to cancel. It's wicked easy to cancel Netflix and restart Disney+, whatever you want to do.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:19:29):
I was thinking about, I used to complain that the user interface for B2B software was horrible, and it's like, you've got to do better than this. And of course, at Netflix we proved that a simple, easy experience actually improves retention. So I would advocate, this is important, and they would explain to me all the basics. Hey, Gib. Actually, one of the basics surprised me. The people that are using our software are using it 10, 12, 14 hours a day. That's very different from a Netflix experience. And in fact, they want and need to engage in the complexity. There's stuff that they're trying to do that is really complex.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:20:07):
You can just think about our use of spreadsheets to build a cash flow statement. I'm highlighting some differences, but the model I think is still there. If you're starting a punk B2B SaaS company, I think at the end of the day, you're trying to find something that's 10X better than what's currently out there today, and then over time, your hard to copy advantage. It will be different from Netflix. It'll be different for every startup. But if you can delight your customers in these hard to copy ways, that also builds a business.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:20:36):
I mean, the reason you do that, you want to feel like you don't have to compete with peeps, really. You don't like it when you're always on guard about what your competitors should do. You sort of want to get to this place where you don't really care, and your sort of true North is okay, how can we best serve our customer? And that's what I really love about that particular model.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:20:53):
Lenny, I would be very careful about anything I say about enterprise and B2B, because I've spent zero hours in this, okay? Now, you said half of my audience is in B2B and enterprise, and you hear a lot about the consumerization of enterprise software, and I think that's good. I think that's helpful and important.

**Lenny** (00:21:13):
Awesome. That's a really helpful caveat for folks listening, that if you're building a B2B business, maybe don't follow all this advice to the letter. But I imagine there's still a lot you can pull out.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:21:21):
Well, honestly, it's so idiosyncratic. It's going to be different for each company, or each startup, or different stage. And that's why the tools, the models, the frameworks I use, they have to work generally, but then people have to apply their own good judgment.

**Lenny** (00:21:33):
Sweet. Okay. What I'd love to do is get a little more concrete using this model, and go through a few examples of how you may have thought through problems you were tackling at Netflix through this lens, to kind of see how it actually works in practice. Does that sound good?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:21:48):
That sounds like we're going to do some rapid fire mini cases.

**Lenny** (00:21:50):
That's exactly right.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:21:51):
And I'm going to put you in the hot seat, Lenny. You're the proxy for the listeners today.

**Lenny** (00:21:55):
All right. Just make sure they're easy questions.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:21:58):
No matter what you say, I'll make you look smart.

**Lenny** (00:22:01):
I like this. I just want that applied to all of life. Okay, so the first mini case study is something that I've seen a lot of people build, kind of hack together, is this idea of watching Netflix together with friends. I think one app is called Netflix Party. So the question there is, should Netflix launch a Netflix Party feature? Basically letting people watch Netflix together but in different places?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:22:22):
Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a real case. A bunch of engineers at Patreon, six or seven of them, they actually enabled, if you're using Netflix, they let you connect with your friends on Netflix, watch the same TV show or movie at the same time, and chat with each other while you're watching it, trash talk each other or use emojis, what have you. They called it Netflix party. The Netflix lawyers noticed it, and so they renamed it Teleparty. It exists. You can use it across multiple games, across Disney and Netflix, whatever you want.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:22:52):
Okay, so the hypothesis is, Netflix should launch this idea for real, not just download the silver light, download the...

**Lenny** (00:23:01):
Chrome extension?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:23:02):
Chrome extension. There you go.

**Lenny** (00:23:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I've tried it, actually. It's pretty cool.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:23:06):
Yeah. It's complicated, right? I mean, you and I are both freaks, so we can figure it out. So the idea is that we'll delight customers, because this sounds like fun, especially during COVID. We can have this connected experience when we're also disconnected. Hard to copy advantage. We're kind of building a network effect. You and I will be connected and watching on Netflix. We don't want to quit because we don't want to leave each other behind. And then, the margin. For Netflix, it's largely about will it improve retention? Netflix today, 2% are canceling. Netflix has just ticked away at it point by point. It's just, it's these kinds of things that create a little bit more value, that improve retention.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:23:45):
The way I think about this is, the way that addition of this feature would actually improve retention is if some reasonable number of customers actually used it. And so, what I look out for is, I don't like two percenters. So if you find an idea that only works for 2% of your customers, now you're creating complexity, one more thing to choose. What happens when I hit this button?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:24:10):
And frankly, some complexity that everybody else building the product forgets, right? This happened to me a lot. We'd have, in the old days, there was a profiles feature. When we launched streaming, we forgot about the profiles feature for DVD. Like, oh, crap. So, as a rule, I never used rules as thumbs, but these two percenters, I would kill them. If I launched something and it was only 2% we'd, we called it scraping the barnacles, just get rid of it.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:24:34):
So, I think the key question here is, what percent of Netflix members would use Netflix Party if you launched to all? You want to guess at that, Lenny?

**Lenny** (00:24:44):
Let's say 5%.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:24:46):
5%. Okay. I think that's good guess. I'm going to give you some historical context. We actually did Xbox Party back in 2008, 2009. My guess with the Xbox team was it would be a two percenter. I think it barely squeaked to 5%. And then, because it was only at 5%, we killed it. So I think that's a great guess. If you had said 10 or 15%, then I would've been scratching my head. Could that actually have a shot at improving retention?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:25:14):
Anyways, Netflix hasn't launched this. They could, of course, test it, but I think the history, the failed hypothesis of social, kind of leans against it, and I just gave you two examples. The friends network getting, giving ideas of friends and Netflix, and the second, the Xbox Party. Those are two failed instances of social. Netflix will keep experimenting with this, but in this case they chose not to. So, not enough delight despite the fact that it could build hard to copy advantage. And if you don't have enough delight, enough usage, there's no shot at improving margin.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:25:45):
Okay. You were awesome, Lenny. I told you, you sounded exceedingly smart. Okay, what do you got? What's the next one?

**Lenny** (00:25:51):
Nailed it. Just real quick, I really like the reminder of just focusing on reach and making... As good as the idea might be, just always coming back to what is the reach of this thing? Even if conversion increases like 50%, if like 10 people see it, it doesn't really matter.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:26:05):
Yeah.

**Lenny** (00:26:05):
That's such a good reminder.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:26:06):
Cool.

**Lenny** (00:26:06):
Okay, next one is, something that you've shared is that during COVID, Netflix auto-canceled, apparently, something like half a percent of its members because they were inactive. And so, the question there would be, why do they do that, and how would Netflix have thought about that?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:26:20):
Yeah. Probably seen Netflix's stock history. But the beginning of COVID, they thought they were going to have 8 million new members, Q1 2020. They picked up 16 million. So, that was awesome. It was about that time that my perception as the product manager at Netflix was looking at the data focused on non-member experience, I think his name is Eddie Woo. And he was looking at the data, and he noticed half percent of the members weren't actually enjoying the service, like for a year. They clearly had entered their credit card, their email a year ago, and then just forgot that they had the service.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:26:51):
And so, when he thought about it, he said, you know, I feel like it's the right thing to actually auto cancel people who aren't using the service they're paying. Of course, he was doing it a time where there was great growth, okay? So, let's use the delight and hard to copy margin enhancing model. Is this a delightful thing to do?

**Lenny** (00:27:10):
Absolutely. I feel really good.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:27:11):
That's my question. Okay.

**Lenny** (00:27:11):
Yeah, if a company's like, hey, okay, here, take your money back. You're not using this thing.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:27:15):
Exactly. And what's the hard to copy advantage that you'd be building by engaging in this best practice?

**Lenny** (00:27:22):
I imagine there's kind of a brand halo, just you feel good about Netflix being really good to you.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:27:27):
Totally. So if I told you, and this is the case, Netflix chose to auto cancel these folks like, huh, that's a really cool thing to do. And then the margin, the bad news, you're going to lose a hundred million bucks. So, there is delight, there is hard to copy advantage, and you're going to lose a hundred million bucks. Does that delight and hard to copy advantage outweigh the negative of losing a hundred million?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:27:50):
I'm just going to ask you two more questions. Is this a high stakes decision or a low stakes decision? Eddie's decision to auto cancel these folks and lose a hundred million bucks. High stakes or low stakes? You're the product manager, Lenny.

**Lenny** (00:28:04):
It all depends on how much a hundred million is worth to the business. I imagine Netflix is such a large scale where it's not a huge deal, and it's a one off that's not recurring, and so you could give it a shot.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:28:13):
Okay, so you've skipped ahead. You're looking too smart. On magnitude, it's a hundred million against a company that's doing 30 billion in revenue. And then, the second thing you brought up is, it's reversible, which is, he could do it now, but he doesn't have to continue this practice forever. And so, my joke there, I got married 30 years ago. I was anxious about getting married. My friend said, "Gib, if it doesn't work out you can always get divorced." So they're saying it's reversible. Now I've been married 30 years, so it's worked out.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:28:39):
But my point here is, as product managers, we feel like every decision we make is high stakes. It's good occasionally to think about, hey, what's the magnitude? And then, is it reversible? Amazon calls those, this was a two-way door decision. It's reversible. The one way door, those are the bigger deal. And I think frankly, most people would argue that getting married is a one way door, but hey, half of folks don't.

**Lenny** (00:29:01):
Yeah, very hard to reverse. Reversible but expensive.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:29:04):
Okay, what else you got?

**Lenny** (00:29:05):
Okay, so you touched on Netflix's recent troubles with growth. And so, something that's always come up is this idea of why don't they offer a really cheap plan, or a free plan that's advertise supported. And so, I imagine you've thought about that a lot, and Netflix has thought about that a lot. How does that work with your framework?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:29:21):
Well, let's fast forward two years. Netflix earnings Q1 2022 were bad. For the first time in 10 years, they actually lost customers, and they'd like to get the growth going again. Okay, that's a different context, right? Today.

**Lenny** (00:29:37):
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**Gibson Biddle** (00:30:18):
So your question is, should Netflix have a lower-priced, advertising-supported plan?

**Lenny** (00:30:25):
Okay, great.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:30:25):
Okay, let's do it. We'll DHM it. Would an ad-supported plan that's lower price be delightful for customers, Lenny?

**Lenny** (00:30:33):
I don't know if delightful is the right word, but if I didn't have a lot of cash, it would feel really nice to be able to use Netflix.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:30:39):
Okay, so the possible delight is, it might only cost you five bucks, or who knows, it might be free, I don't know. But for a set of customers who are ad tolerant, that might be a reasonable trade off, right? You don't have to pay $10 or $15 or $20 bucks. You could pay maybe five, or two? I don't really know what the right price is.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:30:56):
Okay, so the next one is, would Netflix be building hard to copy advantage if they did this?

**Lenny** (00:31:00):
I guess the hards of copy pieces, if there's a network effect, they just accelerate that further, and that gives them some advantage. I don't know.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:31:06):
Maybe. So if they pick up a new set of people, a new set of profiles, it's a technical term, as you get big, is you build economies of scale. So if they are able to grow, Netflix, they'll spend about $18 billion on content this year, whereas poor Amazon will only spend $8 billion. I just love saying poor Amazon. Because Netflix can amortize it across 220 million members. So, more growth, more customers, and hopefully a different segment of customers that they haven't gotten yet, so it's not just cannibalistic, could build more hard copy advantage.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:31:39):
My argument, I'm just going to skip ahead, if you cross fingers, I mean, you are picking up a new customer profile, new customer type, so you're going to have incremental revenues, which is really what Netflix is looking for. For me, I just want to tell you why Netflix hasn't done advertising yet. We actually did do it, 5, 6, 7, 8... 2005 through 2008. We put big-ass ad banners on every page on the site, even for the members. We did a retention test, and it actually did not hurt retention. A big surprise. And that was the first year that we generated an operating income of $20 million bucks. It was like the first profitable year.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:32:14):
We also did this at our business. We were selling used discs, previously viewed discs. That's how we first made money, and Reed Hastings, the CEO, came to me in 2008 and said, "Gib, I need you to kill advertising and previously viewed, because I think we can deliver a profit in our core business." And he wanted to keep things simple, create this simple experience that's part of a subscription.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:32:34):
You have had this. We had a lot of pride and ownership. He didn't involve me in the decision, all of these things, right? He's just sort of sticking a gun to my head. He only asked me two questions. He said, "Gib, who's going to be the best in the world at advertising?" And I said, "Google." And then his second question is, "Who needs to be the best in the world of personalization?" I said, "We do." And his argument was to kill previously viewed and advertising to create a simple experience for the customers, and so that we could stay manically focused on personalization.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:33:02):
Now fast forward, so on the earnings call, for him, the debate is really between simplicity, which he's a huge fan of. But during the earnings call he said, "Actually, there's something I believe in even more, and that's customer choice." And he was saying, you know what? I think for this new set of customers, giving them the choice to have a $5 a month plan with advertising... He did not say the $5 bucks. I'm just plugging that in. In this case, customer choice may be more important than delight. And in this case, rather, customer choice may be more important than the complexity of advertising, or maybe the stinky experience.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:33:39):
Whew. There's something important. What he said is, today it's relatively straightforward to execute an advertising-based business doing this. There's a zillion partners who could do it, so we could continue to focus on the core of what we do, which is personalization. Which I thought was a really thoughtful response. So my guess is, they will do advertising, but he was very contrite. Stock had half of its value. He felt he had disappointed shareholders. So I think he was looking for ways to earn back that trust.

**Lenny** (00:34:05):
Yeah. The market sometimes forces you to do something you didn't expect. I really like the Socratic Method that Reed uses in the story you shared, where he kind of asks you these questions that help you get to the same conclusion he got to.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:34:16):
Honestly, I reflected on that for five years. Why didn't he engage me in the decision? And then I just realized... I mean, by the way, this being a CEO is a really hard job. But I realized I had so much pride and ownership, he just knew that I wouldn't want to kill it, that it would be hard for me to be objective. And he felt strongly that he believed he knew the right answer and said, hey, I just need you to do this. And he was right. So, it took me five years to process that, but there's a lot of things you do to support the CEO, because that job is really hard.

**Lenny** (00:34:47):
We're going to talk a bit about the role of a CPO and what you learned on that journey, but one final mini case study. Should Netflix charge for customers to share their accounts with other people, outside of their home, especially?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:34:59):
Yeah, this one's got a lot of history. Okay, so I sort of told you a bit of the story, which is Netflix's growth has been excellent until now, and the reason they had that challenging earnings call is, it was just really hard to forecast. They had the influx of customers at the beginning of COVID, I call them fence sitters, that just happened to join en masse. And then, are they going to leave when COVID lifts? Are they going to leave when the theaters open up again? They shut down, for 700,000 Russian members, they shut off the service. You can imagine that in Eastern and central Europe, churn was a little higher than expected. Just nasty.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:35:38):
One of the things that this cloud of COVID forecasting did, obscured how the large extent to which sharing happens. And so, what they said was, in the US and Canada, there's a hundred million customers total. They think there's about 30 million folks that are sharing their email password outside the home.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:35:57):
So, how did Netflix get here? Netflix generally, they've got three prices, $10, $15 and $20 bucks, and they're always trying to give people reason for choosing the $20 one. And so, if you looked at their, I call it the price and plan page, it looks like a gas pump. Do you want to the left one, the middle one, or the right hand one? One of the incentives that they provided for folks to choose the $20 a month was the number of multiple streams. They had gone all the way to four streams at the same time. So in my household, four people could be watching the same time.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:36:27):
And of course people shared outside the house, right? And by the way, I don't think Netflix was clear that you couldn't. So now, if you look at the price and plan page today, they're not sort of pitching for multiple streams as the reason you should go to $20 bucks. They're pitching other things. There's better resolution. That's the key one. Better sound quality. You're going to have HDR sound and video. And then, they did clarify in the fine print that you can use one, two, or four streams for members in your household.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:37:00):
And that was a new clarification, because it used to be kind of with a family. Kelsey and Brit are my daughters. They're in the house, of course they can use it. They go off to college, they're still my daughters, they're part of the family. Of course they can use it. Kelsey gets married. Okay, so this is the first time they clarified it.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:37:14):
So now, I come all the way back to your question. As a potential growth opportunity, they'd obviously like to clarify how this should work, and they started testing in three different countries. Peru is one, and I think in the Caribbean. These smaller countries, I'm sure they're focused with new members to figure this out first. And so, they have two different things. You could let a person outside your household, you could actually pay a little extra for them as the primary, as the sponsor, if you will. And the other is a function where a person who's sharing your account in a different household can bump up to their own membership.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:37:48):
So, this is just complicated. Can I make the DHM model work with this? Well it explains why they did it. They were giving multiple streams because it was a really delightful experience. And Netflix says it in the rules. They were very permissive. I don't really think they worried about this. Was it building hard to copy advantage? Absolutely. More taste profiles, right? And you wouldn't leave because you didn't want to cancel the service to your daughter's and using out on the east coast. And was it building margin? Actually, it was driving people up to the $20 price point, and it was improving churn. You're getting more value out of service, okay?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:38:21):
So now, what do they do? For me, this is just testing and math. Like, honestly, let's try it, Lenny. Well, think about those 30 million folks. If you get an email saying, hey, we've noticed you're enjoying the service on somebody else's nickel, would you like to upgrade to your own plan? What percent of those folks are going to say yes, right? I mean, do you have a guess on that? I don't have a guess and I don't have an answer. But this is the game, right?

**Lenny** (00:38:47):
I find with emails, open rates and all these things, it ends up always being really tiny. So I guess, again, probably 5%, maybe 3%.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:38:54):
Okay. I think that's a fine guess. I'll just give you a different perspective. This is kind of like a free trial, right? they've been using a free trial. And the free trial conversion at the end of a month was 90% at Netflix, right? 90% enjoyed their first month so much that they continued with the service.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:39:13):
So, I mean, I agree with you, it might be five or 10%. I was just giving you that 90% to get you to imagine, huh, maybe it could be 10%, right? Maybe it could be 20%. This is just speculation. I think they're experimenting in these smaller countries. As we do this, if it were 10%, they'd pick up an additional 3 million in a quarter. I think that's going to help them when their growth is at a standstill.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:39:36):
The other question would be, would the primary account quit when you tell them their daughters on the east coast can no longer use the service, right?

**Lenny** (00:39:45):
Right.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:39:46):
I think where I'm going on this is, I don't know if we can give any real insight. The team at Netflix, this is what they live for, and the team at Netflix is testing and experimenting. They've probably put in an assumption like yours, 5% will convert, and now they're seeing if they're right or wrong, and they're figuring it in on these smaller countries, and a year or two from now, they will have worked it all out and we'll see the answer in North America. But I think it's going to take them a year or two to figure this out, because it's really hard. But they're keenly motivated, because they're trying to get the growth going again.

**Lenny** (00:40:17):
I was trying to watch Super Pumped on Showtime recently, and Showtime wasn't working, and I have to call my dad, because I'm leaching off their cable login account. And turned out that they moved and they changed their cable plan, and I'm probably the reason they're keeping a lot of it.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:40:32):
Well, so, Lenny, I was thinking about it. I'm open. I don't know the answer on this one, but just you and me comparing notes, what do you think? This is the kind of behavior that I love all product leaders to engage in. I call it building your personal board of directors. You're on mine, because I've been learning a lot about newsletters from you, right? Super helpful.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:40:51):
But when I would have questions like these, I would reach out to my pals, like, okay, what's the right level of investment on a mobile app versus desktop? That was a moving target for years. And I would just text my pals, and they would just give me the data. That's amazing insight, just by having peers in the business that you talk to, which this is the behavior that I want everybody out there engaged in. I call it building your personal board of directors.

**Lenny** (00:41:14):
I'd love to hear a little bit more on that, actually. How do people do that? Is it pick a few people on a topic and have them as your standing board?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:41:21):
I didn't even know I was doing this. This concept began for me, I was probably 30-ish. 30, yep. I got promoted to VP and I asked my CEO, "How do I learn how to do the job well?" And he said, "I don't know. Reach out and build your community of peers." Like, oh, that was good advice. It really was.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:41:39):
So, at any moment in time... You actually had one of my board members on a podcast, Melissa Perri. She's on my board, right?

**Lenny** (00:41:46):
Amazing.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:41:46):
Yeah, you voted for her. So, short answer is, it's really easy to build your community of peers. Just keep up your former colleagues. Keep up on LinkedIn. The harder part is building the mentors. And the first rule of thumb is, don't ask a person to be your mentor. That's really awkward. First, identify them. Say, this is a person I think that could be helpful to me. And then, find ways to be helpful. Everybody needs help. Everybody, everybody, everybody.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:42:13):
So, to help you understand the kind of help I need, my greatest fear is aging ungracefully, right? So I'm trying to understand what's going on. Okay, I asked you earlier, should I be on Discord, right? Like, oh, crap, do I have to be on Discord? But in many cases, somebody can help me to understand Discord. That's super helpful to me. And that's how those sort of mentor relationships eventually end up, and between the peers and the mentors, the mentors can help you to see around corners.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:42:43):
Actually, my favorite story of somebody who did approach me, they were in data, they wanted to be in product. They kept asking me, "Hey, do you have any startups I can work with on the weekends?" That's a good idea. I didn't have any answers. I got sort of frustrated with them. I said, "Just build me a website, a baby website." He said, "I can't build a website." So I gave him my credit card and said, "Get on Squarespace." If you go to GibsonBiddle.com, that's my baby website that John Lou built for me. That was incredibly helpful to me. Someday I should get a real one, but I've decided it's not that important.

**Lenny** (00:43:13):
I also have a baby website on Squarespace.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:43:15):
Exactly.

**Lenny** (00:43:16):
We're in good company.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:43:17):
Anyways, that's the concept of a personal board of directors. It's really important and helpful career advice in the long term.

**Lenny** (00:43:23):
Awesome. I'm glad we chatted about that. That wasn't something we planned to chat About. Something else I wanted to dive into, beyond strategy, is prioritization. You have a really great model for our prioritization called the JAM model, that I share often with folks. I'd love to just kind of hear your overview of this model, and when it makes sense, and just roughly how to use it.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:43:39):
Yeah, well, it's a lot easier because it spells something, right? As opposed to saying... I'll just give you a good case. I joined Chegg 2010. We were inventing a concept of renting textbooks to students instead of buying them, saving them a lot of money. And my first week was challenging, because on one end of the hall, the CEO, Dan, was saying, "Grow, baby. Grow. The most important thing we can do as a startup is grow." And at the other end of the hall, I had my CFO partner, Greg, saying, "Slow, slow, slow. We actually don't know if we have a business model that works." And I could tell he was sort of, the company's got like 40 people, sort of driving folks crazy.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:44:15):
So, as the product leader, what the heck should I do? And the answer was, I got them in a room and I said, "Listen, I just need you to force rank these three factors for me: growth, engagement, and monetization. And I need the two of you to agree." So, you could say growth is most important. When we say growth, it's basically year over year customer growth. Do you want it to be 50% or 10%?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:44:40):
Whatever the answer is, engagement is how I think about product quality. A more engaging product is a better product. So if you think investing in building a better product is super important, then you go with engagement, and the proxy metric that I use for that at Netflix was retention. And then, the third is monetization. You have these customers, you have this product, and how much effort do you put into turning that into a business?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:45:04):
So, Dan said, "Well, that's easy. Growth, engagement, and monetization." And Greg said, "Yeah, that's easy. Monetization, engagement and growth." He did the flip, right? I'm like, "I'm going to come back in two hours. You guys got to fight this out." Which is sort of what happened.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:45:19):
So, they agreed on growth first, engagement second, monetization third. And then, a couple months later, it started to happen again. Greg started to say, "No, no, no." And so, it was that point that Greg actually left the company. Which was, these are the kinds of fundamental misalignments that can wreck startups. I'm not saying that one or the other was right or wrong, but as leaders in the organization, we've got to get some of the basic stories straight, including how do we fundamentally prioritize growth versus engagement versus monetization?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:45:56):
This is really the number one source of misalignment that I discover among startups. And startups, you're always flipping back and forth between growth and engagement. Grow faster, build a better product. Grow fact forth, and then later, you get a little later to monetization. But this model, I find it super helpful to get leaders across an organization fundamentally more aligned.

**Lenny** (00:46:17):
So, if you're a PM, or maybe a founder, thinking about using this model, would the first step be get your leaders above you to kind of align with you on, of these three things, here's how we stack rank it?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:46:27):
Personally, I'd start with a SWAG. I would take a shot, a stupid, wild-ass guess of what I think is right, so at least I started with a point of view before I shared it with my team. And frankly, the next most important thing that happens is, if you're trying to create a metric focused organization that appreciates data and learning through numbers, deciding, I mean, the hardest one is, what is your engagement metric? How do you measure product quality?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:46:52):
At Netflix, it's monthly retention, but that's a hard conversation. The growth story's pretty, like, it's usually some percentage year over year of customer growth. I mean, but it's always different, but the only variation on what you said was, have a point of view yourself, and then get everybody's feedback.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:47:07):
That's frankly, when I would join a new company, I would give myself two weeks to develop the product strategy for that company, which is a little outrageous, but I would just do it fast. I would develop the SWAG, but then I'd go to one person. "Hey, this is my best thinking, what do you think?" And of course, they had been there for four years. They were much smarter than I, and they would refine my thinking.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:47:25):
I'd do that one by one, and then maybe six weeks later, I could share a product strategy across the company. But this is the value of a SWAG, which is a stupid, wild-ass guess. And don't be afraid to start at that level.

**Lenny** (00:47:36):
I really like that strategy, versus going in a little hole, spending months just thinking about the perfect answer, and only then presenting. I find this works better.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:47:44):
We're hiring a consulting company to do it. Go shoot me, okay?

**Lenny** (00:47:47):
I like that you're hiding your mouth as you say that.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:47:50):
Yeah. Only Lenny can see. Yeah, but this is a podcast, Gib. Nobody can see you.

**Lenny** (00:47:54):
Yeah. I will reveal. Okay, so on that topic actually, I'd love to transition and talk about our last topic, which is around career, or product manager. So, you're the CPO at two very successful companies, or maybe you're called the VP of product, but roughly a head of product. You have these two muckety mucks, right? Chief Muckety Muck. And in theory, this is kind of the end state of a PM career if you stay along the path. A lot of PMs go on different paths, but in theory, this is kind of where your career is heading. What would you say it takes to become a CPO someday? What kind of skills do you think you need to build that are maybe not obvious to someone that's not in that role yet?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:48:28):
Yeah, let's take a little step by step. Individual contributor, and then to manager. When you're just starting, you're just trying to learn the job. And I'd say, at a high level, you're just trying to optimize for learning in your entire career. But for individuals, building products is hard, and there's a number of technical skills that are required. So yes, some technical, but a lot of creative skills. There's some consumer science, that's the A/B testing. There's the management. How do you get people working together to actually build stuff? These are technical design skills, right? These are the technical skills.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:48:59):
So, early in your career, you're just trying to learn the job. And by the way, the job is hard. And second, it's different from every company to company in different stage. So you, Lenny and I, we're just trying to be helpful in a leveraged way. But the key thing is, the job's a little different in everything. So, just try to become expert in your area, expert in whatever your one thing is that you're building.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:49:19):
And then, the next step to become a manager is, there's a lot of, communication is sort of the heart, and that's why I try to... Product strategy is a great way to communicate what's important and what's not, try to demystify it. If you're early in your career, ask if you could be on interview teams, even if you're not hiring, because then you're starting to practice something that's really important as you want to grow your career later, which is it's really hiring and recruiting people.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:49:45):
When I was in the thick of that, I spent one to two days a week hiring and recruiting. It's really the most important thing. And then, some amazing opportunity would come along at the company and they'd say, you know what? Maybe somebody on Gib's team should do it, right? Because they knew I could replace people. There's always somebody new to pop in. So, I really was expert in hiring and recruiting later in your career.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:50:07):
If you want to be a muckety muck, my theory is the skills of a leader are the same, whether you're head of product, or the chief financial officer, or head of data. When I'm interviewing any of those kinds of candidates, I am looking for leadership skills. Can they do inspired communication of a vision? I do look for product strategy skills. That helps you to frame what that vision is. I do look for management skills. Have they built and managed teams?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:50:38):
I look for people who are proactive, results oriented. For me, leaders lead. You can't be a follower. So, I look for really proactive, results oriented folks. And this is pretty nuanced, but later in career, I look for folks who understand how important culture is, because culture helps people to understand the skills and behaviors that are wanted of everyone within the building, and they let you provide leadership in a highly leveraged way, instead of using evil processes and meetings and rules. I look for people who appreciate culture as a tool to help lead organizations.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:51:18):
And then, of course, they had to grow up as a builder. They had to learn all those damn technical skills for product manager. If I abstract outside of all that, honestly, the thing that I probably did best, I think maybe I did three things best. To know me, I was an English major. I'm non-technical, and I didn't care. First I was in marketing, and then I went into product, which I just loved.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:51:37):
I think I did a good job with sort of optimizing for learning. Actually, one of my hacks was, I started doing talks. I used to call it Topic This and That, on Friday mornings, about something I had just learned. That was the easiest way for me to learn something. So, optimized for learning.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:51:50):
We talked about building a personal board of directors, and that has been incredibly helpful for me, and that probably gets to the third thing. I was a pretty good picker, and the reason I was a good picker of companies is, I would lean on my personal board of directors. Some of them were CFOs. I'm like, "Hey, Barry, I'm thinking about joining this startup, Chegg." Hey, as a CFO, as a VC, would you invest in it, right? It's the same question I have to ask, should I invest my time?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:52:16):
So, I had people like that who helped me to isolate, was Electronic Arts a good company to join in 1991? Yes. Was Netflix a good company join in 2005? Yes. Was Chegg a good company to join in 2010? Yes. So, I was fundamentally a good picker, and I would really give a lot of credit to that personal board of directors that I had for that.

**Lenny** (00:52:36):
What about just day to day as a PM, what have you found to be really good habits, and kind of like a routine that PMs follow, that you've seen to kind of contribute to the success of an ICPM, especially?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:52:49):
My short answer is, begin your day with intent, okay? What are the three to five things I'm hoping to do today? Second, minimize meetings, okay? Minimize meetings. That sucks the life out of everybody, including you.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:53:03):
Spend a lot of time with your customers. It could be focus groups, it could be usability, it could be looking at survey data, it could be digging the dirt to understand their behavior to the data, and it could be designing and executing A/B test results. Those are all ways of becoming the voice of your customer, and that's a big part of your job as a product leader.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:53:24):
Find a balance between doing and thinking. Most of us do, do, do. Occasionally stop and ask yourself, okay, what's important here? What should I really be doing right now, as opposed to the things that I enjoy doing? Self-managing yourself. The only reason people need managers is that we need someone to force us to do the things that are important that we don't enjoy doing. So, I'm always self-managing myself. Gib, you have to do an invoice. Crap, I've got to bill people. That's no fun, right?

**Lenny** (00:53:56):
That inside voice, inside Gib.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:53:57):
Yeah, that invoice voice. Yeah, our in-voice. Gib, you should write a damn book.

**Lenny** (00:54:02):
Or not.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:54:02):
We're ignoring that inside voice. Yeah, you and me both. And then, I don't know, for me, exercise is awesome for me. It keeps me happy. And don't watch too much TV, and I watch too much TV. So, there you go. And don't do what I do. Do what I say.

**Lenny** (00:54:17):
Right. Yeah. I also probably watch too much TV. Funny coming from someone that helped build Netflix, but I totally get it. So, too good. It's too good.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:54:25):
Well, my wife's trying to cure cancer. She's like, "Oh, congratulations, Gib. You helped invent binge watching, you idiot. What good are you doing for humanity?"

**Lenny** (00:54:34):
Oh, man. Brings us delight, and that's valuable.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:54:37):
Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much.

**Lenny** (00:54:39):
Final question. You've had this illustrious career. What's one piece of advice that you'd give a PM in the beginning stages of their career, and then maybe as a bonus, I want maybe mid stage. What comes to mind?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:54:50):
Yeah, I think I did the early stuff. Pick the right company. At some point, understand that you are responsible for your career, not your workplace. And that's one of the reasons I encourage people to start building that personal board of directors, so you can compare notes. The other thing I say is, don't listen to your parents, because they're a generation ahead. They really don't know what the future looks like. I mean, I know I would give bad advice to my daughter, and so don't listen to your parents.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:55:16):
And then later, ever since I stopped direct deposit, I think of myself as just purely career hacking. So in your career, it's just a lot like building a product. You have theories and hypotheses, you find ways to experiment with them, and then you were successful or you failed. So one of my hypothesis, whenever it was, six years ago, was I would enjoy teaching. I actually tried it. I taught at Stanford, entrepreneurship for graduate level engineers, and I really liked it, but I didn't love it, largely because I was required to be in Palo Alto every fall. I couldn't travel as much as I like to, right?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:55:52):
Okay, so on one hand, okay, don't teach in the classroom, and my next vector was, what if I teach outside the classroom? That's what I really love to do. I do talks, workshops, all around the world in the last two years, virtually. I just love doing that, and I have a ton of flexibility. So, that's just a little example of me treating my career like, what's my hypothesis? Finding where to experiment with, and then, based on the results, do the next thing. And I've really been doing that my entire career,

**Gibson Biddle** (00:56:16):
So, if you embrace this idea of experimentation, you're like a product, you need to have hypothesis, you need to try see what works. The next thing you need to do in building a product or building your career is be bold. So, don't wimp out. At some point, when I'm working with different companies, they all kind of get attracted to the small, incremental wins, and they sort of forgot what made them a successful startup in the beginning, which is taking on fundamental risk. And so, I just nicely encourage people to be bold, to go a little bit out of your comfort zone, because that's where you learn more, and that comes back to this idea of optimizing for learning.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:56:52):
Anyways, and how do you encourage people to be bold? How do you encourage them to try new things? And the simple thing is, just start. Try it tomorrow. For me, the baby step was when I, on talks, I would just ask my friends if I could drop by and do a talk. I just did it. I didn't overthink it. I didn't spend 97 years setting up my display and getting the right clicker. I just gave a really bad talk. But that's how I started, and then I sort of optimized from there.

**Lenny** (00:57:21):
What a perfect way to end our chat. Really inspiring and helpful advice that I'm going to try to re-listen to and use myself. Just to close, where can folks find you, reach out to you, and then also just, how can listeners be useful to you?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:57:33):
That's a great question. Thank you. The first, I would say that Lenny has been a mentor for me in "Ask Gib" Product Newsletter. So, I reached out to him via a Twitter and asked him lots of stupid early questions, so he was incredibly helpful. So, probably the most important thing is to know that I write a newsletter every two weeks. That's the cadence I'm on now. Lenny knew me at the beginning when I was doing dailies. He's like, "Dude, don't burn out." It's called Ask Gib. I've answered like 63 questions so far. I really have enjoyed it.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:58:04):
Second thing would be my baby website GibsonBiddle.com. I have the advantage of being the only Gibson Biddle on the internet. I'm sure you're the only Lenny, but nobody can spell your last name, right?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:58:15):
Yeah, and then the third, how can people be useful? I'm a feedback freak, so you'll notice at the end of every talk I do, every essay, whether you find me on Medium, or Ask Gib, wherever, there's a link to give me feedback. And it's always the same question: On a scale of zero to 10, where zero sucks, 10 is excellent, how likely would you be to recommend this to a friend?

**Gibson Biddle** (00:58:38):
That has been incredibly helpful to me, and that's how I've learned to slowly get better at everything I do. The insight I get each day from folks is amazing. And I'll ask one follow up: but what'd you like, and what could be better? And it's just been incredibly helpful. So, don't ignore that link at the end. Don't treat it like United Airlines asking how is your flight? This is important, damn it! And your feedback is incredibly helpful to me, so thank you.

**Lenny** (00:59:04):
I'm going to go answer some of your surveys now. Thank you so much for doing this. I learned a ton, and I really appreciate your time.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:59:10):
That was great fun, Lenny, and thanks a ton for your help with my Ask Gib newsletter, as well.

**Lenny** (00:59:15):
Forever and Ever.

**Gibson Biddle** (00:59:16):
Okay, cool. I'll hold you to that.

**Lenny** (00:59:19):
That was awesome. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the chat, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You could also learn more at LennysPodcast.com. I'll see you in the next episode.

---

## [6/8] Elena Verna on how B2B growth is changing, product-led growth, product-led sales, why you should go freemium not trial, what features to make free, and much more

**Elena Verna** (00:00:00):
Growth is a fairly new field. You have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks, like what is the sure things to get growth. In the age of social media everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks. Oftentimes things that are completely out of context or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:00:21):
We're going to start with growth tactics that never work. If you see these items on your roadmap, you should probably not do them. What's number one?

**Elena Verna** (00:00:26):
We live in tech. There's always lots of startups and startups obviously looking to grow. There is a huge misconception in the field that in order to get growth going, you need a growth team. To figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, it's not something that you can outsource to somebody.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:00:42):
Powerful words. I'm loving this list already.

**Elena Verna** (00:00:45):
Number two, this was my favorite and it might be a little spicy. Never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially of UK marketing site produce good performance results. New CMO comes in designing their website or designing the brand as if it was reflection of their personal taste, and oftentimes it's promised with our acquisition is going to go up and it never materializes into anything meaningful.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:01:12):
A lot of contrary intakes here, I love this.

**Elena Verna** (00:01:14):
Number three, if every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment that's a problem. It's almost like a disease, like a paralyzing disease.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:01:28):
**Elena Verna** (00:05:23):
Thank you for having me. And my north star metric is insights per minute. That's what I try to use whenever I have any live meetings with people so it squarely fits within what I'm optimizing for. That's great.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:05:37):
That needs to be my KPI on this podcast, "Insights per minute."

**Elena Verna** (00:05:40):
I think you have it. I think your insights per minute is pretty high.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:05:44):
That is. I do shoot for that, although I have learned you also needed to feel good and feel their story. There's an interesting combo stuff. You can't just be insight, insight, insight.

**Elena Verna** (00:05:54):
It's all about how you present them too. Storytelling is a big portion of it actually to stick.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:06:00):
Already insight. That's an insight right there. There's two areas that I want to spend time on with you, and these are areas I know you've been thinking a lot about. One is growth tactics that never work, that people keep spending time on and waste their time on. And I know you have a nice list of things you've seen that just don't work that people keep trying. And then two is growth frameworks, your favorite growth frameworks to help people wrap their mind around how to think about growth and grow their product. We're going to start with growth tactics that never works. Maybe just frame what we're going to talk about, talk about what this list and collection of tactics that we're going to talk about is.

**Elena Verna** (00:06:36):
Growth is a fairly new field compared to marketing or product management or engineering. There's a lot of people that are now accumulated that have 10 years or so experience, but there's also a lot of newcomers and because there's ratio of actually newcomers, it's much higher than those people that have five, 10 years of experience of doing growth. You have a lot of renowned interest in growth hacks. What is the sure things to get growth? What is the sure thing to get that metric up? How can I contribute to success with the company the fastest way possible? All of these shortcuts and obviously in the age of social media where everybody and anybody tries to share their tips and tricks and this and that, people are grasping for oftentimes things that are completely out of context or they are very specific to one example and actually do not apply as a pattern or simply not even applicable to their type of business whatsoever.

**Elena Verna** (00:07:35):
There's just a lot of failure happening in growth teams. Actually, I think growth teams are becoming one of those departments that has a higher head of growth firing rate than even CMOs because people are coming in, there's a bunch of expectations, "Hey, you're ahead of growth or you are a growth pm or you're a growth marketer, you're supposed to drive growth." And when that growth does not happen, here comes the axe and people off they go and the recycle and cycle starts all over in order to populate those positions. I think that there's just a lot of misinformation I would say probably out there in terms of what growth actually is and how it should be done in the companies. And today I just want to cover some of the biggest ones that I see as a patterns as I'm advising companies, as I'm operating in companies because it's just so blatant yet there's very few pieces of information on this for people to learn from.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:08:31):
Amazing. What's number one?

**Elena Verna** (00:08:34):
Number one, I have to start with hiring. There's lots of positions open all the time. There's so many from head of growth to growth PM there's a lot of rotation, as I said that is happening in the field. Very few growth people actually stay in the job for over a year or two years. There's a lot of constant churn and constant rehiring. And when you doing hiring, there's a lot of mistakes that are actually happening in hiring that I just want to start off on the list. It's not a roadmap item, but oh my gosh, there's just so much fault that is happening here. And I did write about it on your blog of hiring for growth. There's a little bit of a reference to that and one of the biggest latent issues that I see is hiring too soon for growth.

**Elena Verna** (00:09:17):
We live in tech, there's always lots of startups. Startups are obviously looking to grow and there is a huge misconception in the shield that in order to get growth going, you need a growth team, absolutely not true. In order to get the growth going in the company, a founder and the founding team have to figure out how to make it grow to the first, let's say a million, 5 million, 10 million in ARR. Some of the companies don't even create growth teams until they're a hundred, 200 million in ARR because to figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it's not something that you can outsource to somebody. It's not somebody that with a shiny resume can come over and all of a sudden wave a magic wand and all of a sudden you have viral campaigns and a bunch of signups coming through and everybody's paying and everybody's retaining.

**Elena Verna** (00:10:09):
That just doesn't happen. I see that mistake happening a lot. I really believe that the founder led growth is not being popularized enough that you do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base, which means that you have volume of users that you can learn from and optimize and innovate on, and that first wave of growth has to be founder led.

**Elena Verna** (00:10:35):
And there's two specific reasons that I incur on, which is before you have growth team, before you would think about growth team first you need to have solid PMF, product market fit, means that you have a solution to a problem and you have customers not only coming in and solving that problem with your solution, but they're also retaining and staying with you. There is a good retention. You can use channel score of how many people would say that they cannot live without your product as well, but there's some sort of PMF. And then number two, you have data growth cannot function without data. If you have 10 users or 10 customers, that's not data, that's a G-sheet with your customers and you don't need a growth team for that. Until you have data that you can actually do an analysis and you can create hypotheses on and you can start applying experimentation, don't even think about growth team.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:11:32):
Just to summarize a few of the things you just said, just for folks, you basically have seen startups look for a head of growth to join and solve their growth problem and your insight there is just almost always that is not going to be the solution to your problem until you have strong retention already, have a really high score on the channel score if don't have a ton of data yet and party advice is just the founder should continue to do this for as long as possible. A million ARR is one milestone a lot of people recommend. To your point, a lot of companies wait lot longer.

**Elena Verna** (00:12:06):
Yes. And honestly, the longer you wait, the better it is because that way your entire company will be trained to be responsible for growth as opposed to putting this one island with a growth team and saying, "They're going to be growing," and what is the rest of the company doing? Honestly, the longer you wait, the better.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:12:24):
As you talk about this, sales is a part of what you described here, like hiring your first sales person. And I guess how do you think about your first head of growth versus salesperson? Is there anything advice there is? Like for B2B SaaS, you probably don't hire head of growth for even longer, you hire sales first or what's your advice?

**Elena Verna** (00:12:42):
It depends on how you're actually going to collect the monies. If your money collection is going to happen through sales team primarily, then you absolutely should be hiring sales way before growth. In fact, in the sales led companies, growth teams are not necessarily needed even that much. You might have a growth marketing team, which is really a demand gen team that is rebranded for growth marketing so they can charge you 20 to 30% more in their salaries, but at the end of the day, sales is doing your monetization. They are doing your activation, they are doing your retention and success efforts. For sales like companies, yeah, higher sales, absolutely. Unless you're starting to do self-serve revenue.

**Elena Verna** (00:13:23):
You're trying to have product sell itself through potentially freemium acquisition, trial acquisition or you actually having product led activation, monetization, that's when you would need a growth person. If you're starting with self-serve monetization, growth hire should be frankly first before sales. Your sales are going to be more opportunistic in nature versus if you sales led company, go ahead, hire sales, wait for growth until you are ready to overlay product-led growth on top of your sales motion.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:13:57):
That's an excellent clarification. Basically what I'm hearing, the advice is hire your ahead of growth only when you have clear product market fit and you're a product-led company and beyond a millionaire ARR ideally something like that.

**Elena Verna** (00:14:11):
Right. And I won't say you're product-led company. You are relying on product-led motion to resolve a lot of the growth levers within you because you don't have to be fully product-led company. But if product, let's say acquires people, let's say with the SEO or SEM, and then its product is meant to activate them and then sales closes them, sales would be obviously important as well, but growth would have to come in a little bit sooner as well. If you have any product-led components where product is responsible for acquisition, activation, monetization or retention, that's where growth comes in.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:14:48):
We talked deeply about that specific topic in our first conversation, just for folks, want to go deeper there. There's lot there.

**Elena Verna** (00:14:53):
I need to bring it back. This is keeps happening.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:14:55):
I love that.

**Elena Verna** (00:14:55):
I need to repeat it. You need to repeat it three times right before it sticks to people. Hopefully this is the third time.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:15:01):
Absolutely. I'm only saying that because people may be wanting more of what you're describing and I will point them to our first episode, which gives deep on that one topic.

**Elena Verna** (00:15:09):
Amazing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:15:10):
Excellent. Anything else before we move on to number two?

**Elena Verna** (00:15:13):
No, let's move on to number two.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:15:14):
Let's do it.

**Elena Verna** (00:15:16):
Number two, this is on the other side on the matured company where I see a trend over and over, and it's becoming even more prominent right now of when companies growth slows down, which inevitably happens for a lot of businesses, it happens for a variety of reasons. We're not going to go into the reasons as to why growth can be slowing down and then they hire a shiny growth head to fix the problem, to basically saying, "Our business is slowing down. We are on the decline. We're going to bring this person, or we're going to put this team together and our growth is going to accelerate." That just does not happen. If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team.

**Elena Verna** (00:16:03):
Growth team can optimize, growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15%. Maybe that's enough for you. Even that is on the upper end of what growth team will be able to do if there is a slow-down trajectory. But what's important is that if you have core product and core marketing issues, growth team will not be able to fix them for you. You're going to have to address the big elephant in the room as to why business is slowing down in the first place as opposed to just plopping a growth team on the issue and expecting them to do miracles while the rest of the business continues chugging on the same trajectory that caused the slowdown in the first place.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:16:41):
Wow, I've never heard this point before and it's such an important one and it's very related to your first point. Growth isn't going to build a product people want, they will help you grow it

**Elena Verna** (00:16:53):
Exactly.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:16:54):
If your business is slowing, your product market fit basically might be disappearing and growth isn't solving that problem.

**Elena Verna** (00:16:59):
Disappearing, it may be degrading, it may be being eaten by a competitor because there's somebody that is stomping on your territory. The point is growth can amplify great product market fit and growth can help you grow faster once you are already growing. But if you are slowing down and you have issues with either your go-to-market strategy or your core product strategy with your core product market fit, growth is going to be absolutely helpless to do anything. And it's honestly, it's a huge waste of money because at those size of the companies, you would make fairly large growth teams in order to tackle every single product flow and interface that is already out there and invented.

**Elena Verna** (00:17:45):
It's a huge expense. ROI on it, maybe at least one to one. What you put into it, you might get that much out of it, but it's not going to be enough to create a J curve of the reacceleration by just relying on growth team. I think it's just like this is where the name growth team plays against it because, "We're looking for growth. Do you have a growth team?" No. I don't have a better idea by the way how to name it, but this is where I think it's misunderstood that there's the silver bullet of a perfect head of growth, perfect growth team that can reverse the trajectory of the business.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:18:26):
Then for folks that are thinking about, "Wow, maybe I should be hiring head of growth," when should you hire head of growth? When you're an established company,

**Elena Verna** (00:18:33):
If you are declining in your revenue growth or whatever other metric that you're looking at, your weekly active users or whatnot, see at least that you're able to plateau it so you can stop the decline. There is already a visible trajectory that your core product and your core marketing teams are able to at least reverse the degradation of the metrics. Ideally, you would even start to see some immediate signs of life that there is potential in the business, in the pockets, and then you can put growth into it to really blow it up to the full extent. But if you are on a decline, just don't do it because there's going to be very disappointing results in the year or so.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:19:18):
Awesome. Great one, let's move on. Number three.

**Elena Verna** (00:19:23):
Number three, this is my favorite, and it might be a little spicy because if there's any marketers listening out here, but doing rebrand more specifically, homepage redesign to drive growth. This is what hurts me so much and I've lived through so many of these and never ever once have I seen a rebrand or redesign, especially a UK marketing site, produce good performance results. Now, there's many reasons as to why you might want to do a rebrand, why you might want to design your marketing site because you're trying to enter a new market, new category, your product has evolved and you need to do a full update. But those are almost like it's a logging indicator that something needs to change and you're changing it and then you know that you're going to have to optimize the hell out of it in order to actually bring it even to the previous performance results.

**Elena Verna** (00:20:22):
It's like a stepping stone back, but there is a much bigger room for upside that you can get to, but you are going to have to work to get to that upside. But yet so many companies, there's a story that happens all the time. I hire a new CMO, new CMO comes in, they're like, "What's inside my house here? My house is not designed to my liking. Let me repaint these walls. I want this shade of blue. Let me put the couches over here." And they start almost designing their website or designing the brand as if it was reflection of their personal taste. And oftentimes it's promised with our acquisition is going to go up, our category penetration is going to go up, our education or awareness is going to go up.

**Elena Verna** (00:21:10):
And it never materializes into anything meaningful because again, if you're doing it as a step towards unlocking new global maxima, sure, I love that. Do it. Go after it. Know that you have a ton of work ahead of you in order to actually unlock that global maxima. But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, often a million dollars plus, lots of arguing about which shade of blue your brand color is going to be, and eight to 10 months at the minimum of development and very lackluster results afterwards.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:21:58):
Oh man, I'm loving this list already. This is great. To your point, it may still be worth doing if you're coming into it eyes wide open, this isn't going to drive growth, but we're setting ourselves up for a future brand that's world-class and we know our current brand stinks and our homepage needs to be refreshed. If you're aware, it's not going to drive growth, it might be okay.

**Elena Verna** (00:22:19):
Every single time I've seen a marketing site at least rebrand, it's been a step back in performance that then is being treated as a fire drill to fix. Just don't do it if you expect immediate results out of it, or at least educate the team on how long it's going to take to get to the point where you think that there's going to be upside away from your original brand.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:22:48):
I've experienced this not just with marketing sites, but most redesigns. Redesign of the product.

**Elena Verna** (00:22:53):
Product redesign. How much product and engineering work comes into just changing a logo in your product or changing colors? It's insane. With no results ever, there's no results.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:23:06):
And to your point, it's like, "We've spent six months redoing onboarding. Everything we've built builds on this new design and experience, we can't not launch it. Every team is working on this new world, we're just going to launch it and then we're going to claw back. We're going to figure out how to get it back." That's how it goes.

**Elena Verna** (00:23:26):
It's a new starting point and that starting point is going to be much lower than your current optimized experience that you have. Whether it's well optimized or not optimized, it doesn't matter. It's gone through some level of optimization versus rebrand is always a shot in the dark. It might be prettier, sure, but that doesn't mean it's going to perform well. Obviously never say never. Sometimes it might work, and if it worked for you, I am so glad. But that's an outlier and don't treat it as a pattern.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:23:57):
And I was just going to say, I think everyone listening to this that is working on something like this is probably thinking, "No, I think we have a good shot at this."

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:24:00):
... is working on something like this is probably thinking, "No, I think we have a good shot at this. We've really thought deeply about this and it might actually be really positive." In your experience, it sounds like you've seen it work occasionally, or is it just never?

**Elena Verna** (00:24:15):
The best I've ever seen is that it produced net neutral results and it produced us better ability to optimize towards something bigger. That's the best case scenario. So if you're working on it, my biggest advice is not to say you stop. Just understand that the goal here is not to drive at launch, in the seven-day readout after launch, some increased performance.

**Elena Verna** (00:24:38):
The goal here should be, we will launch, we will probably see a hit, model out and forecast for a hit, and then give yourself two to three months at the minimum, ideally more like six months, to really optimize it back to a good standing where it can potentially outperform. But you need to bake in that three to six months of work after the launch, which is what a lot of companies and teams forget to do because they just move on. Because it's like big initiative, big pop, and off we go to our next project.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:25:08):
I love that we're only at number three. This is amazing. Let's do number four.

**Elena Verna** (00:25:13):
Okay. Number four is obsessing over your competition. Okay, so there's a little bit of a gotcha here. I tear down companies all the time. I have thousands of Gmail accounts that I sign up for any and every product. I go through their entire experience. I look at their monetization strategies. I look at their activation. I do it across direct competition of the company that I'm working with as well. I want to know what I'm playing against.

**Elena Verna** (00:25:45):
So knowing what your competition is doing is extremely important. Being inspired by some aspects of what your competition is doing in their experience is a wonderful place to originate an ideation or potentially try to implement into your product as well. But blatantly saying, "Hey, we're going to copy all of these best tactics or all of these flows because, hey, they're doing better than us. Let's just rip them and do exactly the same. Why isn't our onboarding looks the same as this onboarding? This company is so successful."

**Elena Verna** (00:26:20):
That's where things really go wrong because every single experience is very unique to their customer, to their channel. You don't even know if you're getting their actual experience or you use some tester cell or you're getting some personalized thing based on where you signed up from, who you said that you are. So you don't even know what actually the overall thing looks like most of the time and putting that into your product, it just leads to very subpar results. And there's a lot of drive, especially to have it as a shortcut. "Okay, we don't want to go through this ideation or user research. We don't want to do user interviews, but we don't want to do A/B testing. It works for them. It must work for us. Let's just go and do it." And it fails 95% of the time.

**Elena Verna** (00:27:08):
Now, there are certain pieces that I would rightly recommend. I already said inspiration. I use it for inspiration all the time. I'm like, "Okay, what's cool? What is everybody doing?" So because I want to just stay in the know on what other people are implementing and hopefully if it's in the control experience, it works and it worked better. I use web archives a ton for locked out pages too. I'm like, okay, how did it look last year? Why does their whole page look this way, or the pricing page? And I analyze that and I try to extrapolate some results.

**Elena Verna** (00:27:40):
I also think that there is a lot of patterns you start to notice as you start tearing down all of these companies. You're like, "Oh, these elements are always the same." That means all of these companies are arriving to these things and they seem to be winning elements. And you can take those elements and put them into your product, but you can never skip the ideation, the design, the user research, the customer interview, the experimentation step.

**Elena Verna** (00:28:04):
And you should always balance it with actually innovating yourself in your product. Because copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocrity because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else. Leader is by default is somebody that is able to separate themselves from the pack in something else. And if you are trying to just be, I don't know who is ever trying to be the mediocre middle of the pack, but maybe it's a good starting point, but never the end goal.

**Elena Verna** (00:28:37):
The only other thing that I'll say before I'll stop talking is benchmarks. Benchmarks are also very dangerous here to use because benchmarks are usually done on all of the competition, on all of the softwares out there. And the way people define numbers is so different from company to company. Even if you look as something as simple as signups. Okay, how many signups should you be on average getting? Or your conversion from prospecting visitor to a signup? Or from a signup to activated user? It's so depends on how do you define prospect visitor? Some companies define it as all traffic. Some define it as new traffic. Some of them define it on the new IP address, new persistent id. How Google analytics defines it. How Amplitude defines it.

**Elena Verna** (00:29:21):
So all of these definitions are so different. So taking also any benchmark that is derived from competition and saying, "This is where we should be," is also so dangerous because it might not even be applicable depending on how you define the metric. And one of the things that all of those benchmarking data fails is to actually look at specific definitions. And that's not to say that benchmarks are not extremely valuable data point in your decision making because it's an input that you should leverage to say what it could be possible. But to just blindly it and set it is just a sure way to fail any of your initiatives and efforts.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:30:04):
You're telling me that there's no shortcuts?

**Elena Verna** (00:30:10):
I wish there were. I mean, I've been doing this for over 15 years. If there were any shortcuts, I'd be all over them. There are patterns and there are frameworks, but there's no shortcuts.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:30:20):
So people hearing this, they're like, "Okay, don't copy the competition. Use it for inspiration." It's a little hard to know exactly the line between those two. Is there an example that you can think of where you took really interesting inspiration from someone and it worked for a company you're working with? Or you copied someone and it's just like, "Oh, that failed. That was a bad idea."

**Elena Verna** (00:30:41):
I use competition to understand the general framework of how people collect some information or resolve certain steps. So, for example, a sharing model so many products like, "Hey, can you share this with somebody?" Well, you can go and spend so much time of figuring out how it should look. Or you can go to Slack, you can go to Figma, you can go to Nero, you can go to Notion. Like, okay, Google, how are they doing sharing model? You can look at all of that and say, "Okay, here's all of the common elements that all of them have. Here's the pieces that I think will apply to my product. Here's things that do not, and here's what I can derive from it."

**Elena Verna** (00:31:19):
I use it as an input into ideation, but I never use it as a destination for the result, if that makes sense. Because it's very helpful to not start from scratch. The empty start problem is real and competition is a wonderful way to not have that and to have input into it, but never to just say, "Oh, we can skip the design cycle off we go," or, "Just slap our colors on it. If it works for them, it's going to work for us." So I have extensive Nero boards with everybody's onboarding flows, with everybody's pricing pages, their sharing model, their invite colleagues models that I reference all the time.

**Elena Verna** (00:32:00):
But they've never been the exact thing that I would use for any company as opposed to say, "Hey, I think this is a great starting point for you. Here are the things that I think will work very well for your company and for your product and take these elements. The rest you need to go and do themselves, so at least that way there's a starting point."

And this is why I also started doing a lot more of my own, almost, prototypes, like skeletons of here's the elements that you should do in these flows. I have one for pricing page, I have one for homepage, but you need to put in your own [inaudible 00:32:36] into it, in order for it to actually work.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:32:39):
What made me realize this back in the day was thinking at Airbnb, especially, thinking about people looking at our flow and being like, they've got it all figured out. We're just going to copy what they've done, so thoughtful and have tested everything. And knowing how that has not happened and how so much of this was guesswork and we hate so much of it. Just thinking about people trying to copy this thinking we know what we're doing. It's like, "What are you guys even thinking?"

**Elena Verna** (00:33:02):
Oh my God, I actually had that happen to me. At Dropbox not so long ago, somebody reached out and they're like, "Oh, I looked." It was like some page on activation flow and they're like, "Oh, I love this page. This is so cool. I love what you've done here. I'm going to go take it to my company." I'm like, "We haven't touched it in 10 years. This page is only visible for small cohort of people. Please don't do it. Please don't copy it. It performs like shit. I know it's out there, but it's not meant to be out there. Nobody thoughtfully put it out there." So that's definitely a huge failure point that you can run into.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:33:42):
Right, if it's like a fancy company, assume they're just so smart and diligent about every little pixel and decision.

**Elena Verna** (00:33:48):
If people only knew of how much craziness is happening in those big companies and how much chaos there is.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:33:57):
Oh man, that's a whole other podcast episode.

**Elena Verna** (00:33:59):
Whole other podcasts, yes.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:34:00):
Okay, number five.

**Elena Verna** (00:34:02):
Okay, I have this one. It's a little bit Meta, but I see it happening all the time. We love to think that our problems are unique. I'm working in this company and we have this gross problem and we need to go and figure out the solution from the grounds up. Maybe this is a little bit related to the competition point, but I'm very sorry to break it to all of you, but your problem is not unique. I am 99% sure of that. Your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere in probably many, many places and you trying to re-engineer solution is time lost to market and has a huge opportunity cost.

**Elena Verna** (00:34:49):
So my biggest thing that I try to get people is don't think that you have unique problems. You don't. I know we love to. It'd be fun to have something unique to learn, but with so many startups, with so many people in our industry, in your industry, whichever industry that is, your problem has been solved by somebody. Or at least that there's a lot of failures on the problem that you should be learning from. And number one thing that whenever you have an initiative or whenever you have a metric that you need to go and move, to not start from scratch, ever. Do not start from scratch. It's the worst thing that you can do because you can waste so many cycles on trying to do something that probably has already been solved, which means how do you approach this as a result?

**Elena Verna** (00:35:41):
Well, you can look at competition and how they're solving the problem. That's one input, for sure. You should go find people that have solved this problem because there are people there and people love to talk about what they do. So take advantage of that human psychology and go find those people and just ask them, "How did you do it? What did you do? What happened?" Obviously, not all the time everybody's going to respond, but we have LinkedIn, we have X. Go out there, find the people that you think or ask around in your network of who you think might have similar solutions and just go talk to people. It would be incredible shortcut if you're talking about an actual hack that is a hack to get to an optimal solution.

**Elena Verna** (00:36:26):
And then the last thing that I would also say is that solving any one problem uniquely is extremely inefficient. We are evolving so fast in our market, you need to be able to patternize your solutions. Patternize, is that a word?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:36:43):
Let's make it a word.

**Elena Verna** (00:36:44):
Make patterns. Make patterns out of your solutions. So more you can stop looking at as a unique data point or unique problem and more as there is, I need to fit it into existing pattern or I need to figure out the framework on how to solve not only this problem but other problems. The faster you'll be able to get at least to like 60% of the solution there. And then you can do very authentic implementation of whatever you want to do. But to go from zero to 60 manually, as a one-off, we do not have time in the industry right now to do it, unless you want to be left behind.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:37:23):
Bam. Powerful words. Is there an example that comes to mind of you doing this either the wrong way of just thinking this was unique and realizing I should have talked to people, or where you actually realized something was not unique?

**Elena Verna** (00:37:37):
I'll give you actually an example that I had when I was at Nero. At Nero, we were first trying to stand up community, and I was tasked to do it, and I've never done it before. So I was banging my head around against the wall and I'm like, "Okay, how do I do it? What software do we use? Where do we acquire users? What kind of content is going to go in there?"

**Elena Verna** (00:38:02):
So I was approaching it almost like a finding product market fit, and I will fail so much doing it. And I honestly only have a year to get to some sort of traction before this is going to get shut down because company is impatient, company is moving fast. So if this is going to be a failure point, it's either going to be taken away from me, which is fair, or we is going to close the door on it, which would be a huge failure both on my point and for company as a whole.

**Elena Verna** (00:38:29):
So I went and I started talking to a bunch of people that have done communities, and I remember talking to Caroline from Atlassian who has stood up community. I actually hired her as an advisor afterwards and she's like, "Well, are you talking about a user community or an agency community or a partner community?" And I'm like, my mind was blown. I'm like, "I even considering all of these angles because I was just literally thinking about users only." And she's like, "Well, you shouldn't necessarily start with the user community. If you want some results out of it, go to agency or partner communities first." She would applying it to me in a structural way for me to grasp my head around it and then implement something that had much better results at the end that I wouldn't even gotten to probably until six, eight months later, if I didn't talk to her.

**Elena Verna** (00:39:19):
So I think it has to come with a place of knowing that you don't know everything and humility to say, "Hey, I need help," and I might have a already fancy title. At that point, I was an interim CMO at Nero and I'm like, "I don't know how to do this." And it actually earns you a lot more credit than you think. And a lot of people are afraid to admit that they don't know how to solve a problem and that's why they start from scratch. But you need to really put your ego aside and get some help faster than trying to hit every single failure point along the way.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:40:02):
And the thing that'll really hurt your ego is failing. And so the more you could do to avoid failing and being successful with this initiative by talking to people, doing research.

**Elena Verna** (00:40:12):
And to be fair, failure is going to be unavoidable. If you talk about growth, growth is about failure. My big motto, life motto on growth is that you have to fail to learn. You can't just constantly succeed. Success is an output of a lot of failures, but the question is, how much time do you have to fail? And a lot of times we don't realize how many failure cycles we're going to have to go through before we get a success, and that company, or even market, has no time for that. So still expect to fail, sure, but the timeline for failures is going to be shortened quite a bit.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:40:54):
Okay, so we've gone halfway through your list. There's 10 items on this list, right?

**Elena Verna** (00:40:58):
Yes, yes. There's 10 items. Next one is a good one.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:41:01):
I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina.

**Christina Gilbert** (00:41:08):
Yes. Thank you for having me on, Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:41:10):
What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Scale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs.

**Christina Gilbert** (00:41:26):
Yes, so we just launched OneSchema file feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:41:47):
I can tell you that if team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap and instead use something like OneSchema and not just to build it, but also to maintain it forever?

**Christina Gilbert** (00:41:59):
Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of ad records. We are laser-focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system, and OneSchema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:42:19):
I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us and if you want to learn more, head on over to oneschema.co. That's oneschema.co.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:42:33):
Let me summarize the first five real quick and then we'll keep going. So the first is, wait longer than you think to hire a head of growth. Wait until you have product market fit, maybe a million, or especially if you're self-serve oriented.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:42:45):
Number two is if your growth is declining, the head of growth won't solve that problem. First, stop the decline at least. Third is redesigning your homepage, marketing page. Rebranding is not only not going to help you grow, it's going to probably hurt growth and slow things down. And so just go into that wide eyes wide open.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:43:07):
Four is don't just copy the competition and assume they know what they're doing and assume that what they do is going to work for you. Use it as inspiration. On the other hand, look at get inspiration from experts, competition, trends, things like that to help you solve your problem, which you think is no one solved before. It turns out every problem you're solving someone has solved in some way, most likely.

**Elena Verna** (00:43:30):
Yes, especially in growth. I mean, I know this can apply to a lot of product management and to marketing as well, but in growth, when you're talking about how do I lift activation or have a really big drop off between activation and monetization? These things are a lot more patternized than you would expect them to be, so go and find those patterns as opposed to trying to re-engineer it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:43:55):
Awesome. Okay, let's keep going. Number six.

**Elena Verna** (00:43:57):
So next one. Next one is a little spicy one too, and that is part of growth you owning some channels. A lot of growth teams own acquisition. So owning channels and growth prioritizing SEO, SEM, social, is one of the biggest mistakes I think a growth team can do. Now, obviously, I'm not saying don't do SEO, or don't do SEM, so organic search or paid search. I'm not saying that. However, as a growth team, your number one priority is to create your own or your earned channel. So channel that you've earned and that nobody else can compete in but you.

**Elena Verna** (00:44:45):
What do I mean by that? When you're doing organic search or paid search, you're making Google richer. Great for Google. Google is an incredible company, but by dumping money into paid marketing, you are paying them and you're paying for their distribution and access to their distribution. If you're doing social too, like you're doing, let's say, Instagram or whatnot, paid advertising in Instagram, that's great, but all of that works on algorithm. An algorithm can giveth, but algorithm can also taketh away at any point. And you have no control because you don't own those channels. You are playing with other players and you're competing against them in somebody else's channel.

**Elena Verna** (00:45:29):
Now, on the other side, there can be your own earned channel. What is earned channel? It really goes into the concept of product-led growth acquisition, which means you're relying on virality, on word of mouth, on user-generated content in order to attract new acquisition through top of the funnel. So why is that earned and why do I put that above, let's say organic search, which is SEO, obviously, is wonderful? But again, search just goes to Google. That's great. Versus if you build your own user-generated content in your own community, nobody else can compete with you in that. That is yours. Your competitors cannot buy their eyeballs. Their people are going to be attracting other people.

**Elena Verna** (00:46:21):
Referrals from people to people are everything. So, Lenny, if I, let's say I sign up for, say, Superhuman and I invite you into it. That is much stronger acquisition tactic versus you looking for and finding Superhuman, let's say on paid marketing advertisements. And especially with our age right now where search as an interface is changing towards AI interface and the AI interface is giving a lot less credit to all of the content. Content is almost becoming a database and there's a new UI that is being developed on it. Before it was Google was the UI, and now AI is coming in with a new UI, and there's not as much control that you have over this new UI that is being developed.

**Elena Verna** (00:47:05):
Focusing on these earned channels that you own becomes the outmost priority. And if you don't have them on your growth roadmap, you are going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up. Your competition and those channel is only going to go up. You're constantly going to be praying to algorithm Gods to giveth your way, but again, they can taketh at any point. And it's really one of those fundamental growth team failure points if they don't spend enough time on virality and user generated content to create their own earned acquisition.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:47:48):
Wow. Okay. This is incredible. This is its own podcast episode in theory that we could do of how to actually do this. We're not going to cover the strategy. Also, this may not necessarily work for every company. Your point is, you can grow other ways, but this is by far ...

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:48:00):
Your point is you can grow other ways, but this is by far the most powerful, most effective, cheapest, most likely to succeed. If you can figure this out.

**Elena Verna** (00:48:08):
It's not cheapest. It's actually cost a lot of product and engineering and even marketing resources to stand up. So it's not the cost of a budget, but it's cost of people that will have to work to create your own channel, so to speak, for acquisition. And you're right, maybe that's not for everybody, but it's actually applicable to more products than people realize. Because, every single product has some sort of team functionality, some sort of roles that they need to do. Every product can drive word of mouth loop... Well, actually, that's not true. Not every product can drive word of mouth loop, but they can drive recommendations and they can create user generated content.

**Elena Verna** (00:48:46):
One of those tactics usually applies to at least one product. So there is an opportunity to create some sort of earned channel, even though it might feel unnatural at the beginning depending on how you reach PMF and how you've scaled in the first couple of stages of it. But if you are not exploring it and if you are not investing into it or at least trying and failing within it, I think that you are really leaving too much of your growth future into the hands of somebody else that you have low control over.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:49:19):
So the advice here is your growth team. It's okay if they work on SEM, pay growth basically and SEO, but most of your effort and investment should be in earned channel, owned channels, specifically virality generated content?

**Elena Verna** (00:49:35):
Diversify. Just diversify your strategy. So not all of it is reliant on somebody else giving you access to their distribution. Now, for example, a Dropbox, over 50% of acquisition comes through sharing. So I load something into my Dropbox, maybe I need to send it out for signature. Maybe I need to just share this file to transfer it to somebody. Maybe I just need to share this file as a final delivery to my clients that I was working with. Well, that recipient then is now aware of Dropbox, so it solved the brand awareness.

**Elena Verna** (00:50:09):
By that action of sharing, you actually almost activated that recipient too, so you don't need to educate them anymore on how the product works and whatnot. And the percentage of those recipients sign up to become Dropbox users, and that accounts for 50% of acquisition. That is a stable earned channel that nobody can compete with, and it's only for Dropbox to lose, so to speak. And we actually had our own growth pod focused on it. Because to optimize both sender experience and the recipient experience, because it was such a powerful growth and growth engine that driven the company, and every business should have an attempt at one of these.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:50:51):
I think this is going to be a really good push for a lot of growth teams to think about what could we do here? Number seven. Four to go

**Elena Verna** (00:50:58):
Number seven. We've talked about this at least a little bit in our last podcast too. But I see this as a question that comes up all the time and something that people are afraid of to invest, which is a mistake. Every single company starts with their growth efforts focused either on product-led growth. Hey, I'm going to have everything being done self-serve or on sales in marketing. I'm going to have sales team and then I'm going to have marketing team and they're going to do all of the work and my product is just going to create the functionality. And that's good and fine for a while depending on how long that while is. But not overlaying every single way that you can grow through product, through marketing and through sales as an evolution. Is a huge mistake that a lot of growth teams fail to iterate on and innovate on.

**Elena Verna** (00:51:53):
The way that I best be comparing it is if product has a product-market fit, which is great, that product-market fit is not going to last that product forever. They're always going to have to have a second horizon. They're always going to have to have a product-market fit expansion efforts in order to continue to grab as many people and solve as many people's problems as possible and increasing their team. Well, the same comes with growth. If you have a growth model that works for you, that's wonderful, good for you. Optimize it, grow it, scale it, create a team that will be nurturing it and that will be amplifying it, but you're going to need to evolve it, and that evolution needs to come through overlaying other growth models on top of it. So, A, you are diversified away from just one growth model failing, because a lot of times you're going to get into a situation of law.

**Elena Verna** (00:52:48):
I love Andrew Chen's article here. It's called a Law of Shitty Clickthroughs. Where if you over-optimize the same thing over and over again, it has minimal returns, and some growth models have very limited time spans. Some of them are huge, some can grow for sharing loop at Dropbox. It's 17 years in the making and it's still firing. Good for it. That's amazing. But that's very much an anomaly. Most of growth loops spin out their ability to produce meaningful results for you within the first five to six to seven years.

**Elena Verna** (00:53:21):
So continuously overlaying those different growth models, and what I'm specifically talking about is product-led growth, marketing- led growth, sales-led growth, and introducing it into this ecosystem constantly is what really separates companies that can continue growing for a long periods of times versus the ones that can see a really big blip, potentially even unicorn type of growth rates of 70, 80, whatever plus percent, and then it starts to slow down. And don't wait until that slowdown happens. You need to really start thinking about different ways that you can attract people to grow so you are not leaving a gap in the market that somebody else can enter and own. As opposed to you playing in every way in where you can interact with your customer.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:54:13):
The way I think about this is the S-curves of every growth model and growth lever, right? Eventually it'll help and then slow down and see you want to find the next S-curve on things that'll grow your business.

**Elena Verna** (00:54:24):
Yes, absolutely. The way that I see it often is that especially when growth teams, they hit a really big result out of some initiative, they just keep trying to focus on that over and over again. And sometimes that focus is warranted. Like I said, our sharing loop at Dropbox has its own growth team against it. Great, but at the same time, a lot that's not warranted for all of the... Or you need to realize that there's not more choose to squeeze out of this thing and then you need to go and you need to move on.

**Elena Verna** (00:54:57):
Which actually brings me to a little bit of a next thing too, is you need to do it every 18 months. Because a lot of them are going to fail. And every five years or so, you for sure need new channel, new growth loops, new tactics, new engines so to speak, to power your growth engine. Whether it's overlaying sales on top of self-serve, whether you're doing a lot of, let's say virality right now in terms of acquisition and you're going into marketing a lot heavier. But every five years something big has to start taking a big portion of your volume. And for that every 18 years you need to introduce something-

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:55:39):
18 months.

**Elena Verna** (00:55:40):
Sorry. Yeah. Every 18 months you need to introduce something new in order for it to continue evolving.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:55:49):
And was that number eight of the list we're going through or that's like a bonus piece of advice?

**Elena Verna** (00:55:52):
No, that's just a bonus piece of advice.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:55:55):
Okay, cool. Okay, got it. And so the advice here essentially is you'll find something that is helping you grow, assume that will slow down at some point, start thinking about other levers and growth models to layer on top of that.

**Elena Verna** (00:56:08):
Yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:56:10):
Something I've seen, let me know if you agree, is usually there's going to be one lever that has most of your growth for a long, long time, and so all other things are not going to be as big, but they are still important.

**Elena Verna** (00:56:20):
So the way I think about it is I try to focus 20 to 25% of growth teams time annually. Not every given sprint or not every given quarter, but annually to introduce a new growth loop, or to introduce a new channel, or to introduce something new that can potentially bring us additional umpth to our growth engine. I know that a lot of it is going to fail. None of it is gold on any growth metrics because you cannot goal it immediately, let's say on monetization or immediately acquisition. You're just going to cut it at its knees immediately if you're not going to let it evolve into something that can be monetized, that can be responsible for acquisition. So example on Mirrorverse, which is a user-generated content library of all of the mirror boards that people create, it took us probably 18 months until we started putting metrics expectations on it.

**Elena Verna** (00:57:18):
Before that, it was a thing that we were testing. And it was being used by a lot of people, but we're like, we don't even know exactly quite how this is going to fit all together. And then it started taking off as both engagement engine as well as acquisition engine. But it's important to constantly give your team room to try those new ideas. Otherwise, you're going to find yourself that your growth loops and your growth engine is slowing down and you don't have time to find that second horizon. And that is the worst situation to be in. That's where growth starts to slow down. And to recover out of that is impossible because you need revenue. You need revenue, you need revenue, you need revenue. And these growth loops on average take six months, a year, a year and a half to start producing even visible revenue. So that's why you need to start layering it very soon into your initiatives.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (00:58:13):
To make this even more concrete for people that are starting to like, oh, shit I got to do this. Can you just give us a list that doesn't have to be exhaustive of potential growth loops, levers, methods, engines for folks to consider? You've mentioned a few, but just give a list of people like, okay, got it. Maybe we'll try one of these.

**Elena Verna** (00:58:29):
I'm really big on creating a growth loop out of user generated content. I think with everything that is happening with AI and SEO at the moment, your biggest claim to fame on content strategy will be harnessing user generated content. Whether it's user generated templates, whether it's user generated case studies, review, whatever it is you need to start investing into it now, creating a library out of it, using it for activation purposes, using it then for acquisition purposes, using community to spark the conversations around it. That can be a really wonderful strategy that everybody should consider of whether there's juice in it within your product. Other ones can be, hey, we're a very, let's say individualistic product, but can we actually create a referral mechanism for it?

**Elena Verna** (00:59:23):
For B2C, that's actually very straightforward. A lot of B2C products thrive on referrals. For B2B, It can be more of invitation of other team members into the product to complete other jobs to be done. Hey, I've done this. I need my manager to see it. Can I create a report to share with my manager? And all of a sudden it starts to spread within the company. So creating additional almost product functionality that then creates these loops potentially for you. So it can be a slew of things. Obviously, I would highly recommend just understanding all of the menus of these earned tactics. I should do a blog post on it actually. And then just see what works for you or not. Because at least ideation step a bit has to happen. If especially you're relying on search engines for your acquisition, start thinking about some of the earned channels as soon as possible.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:00:22):
And even though you recommend spend more time on earned channels, owned channels, there's also explore SEO, explore paid growth, right? Sales?

**Elena Verna** (01:00:33):
Absolutely. I mean, almost everybody that's paid, arguably almost too soon potentially. There's a point to make that shouldn't be. A company should not be doing paid right now, but SEO, social resellers, all of those are wonderful tactics. Obviously, I skew very heavily towards earned channels just because once you stand that up, that's a gift that just keeps on giving and nobody can take that away from you. But that doesn't mean that other tactics and other channels should not be explored as well.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:01:06):
Amazing. Let's keep going. So we have three to go. Number eight.

**Elena Verna** (01:01:10):
So number eight, this one's kind of a doozy and I think a lot of people don't do it. I don't know why they don't do it. I think it's such an incredible ability to propel forward. And that is, what doesn't work, as I said in the previous growth tactics, is trying to think that each problem is unique and you need to solve it on your own. Maybe this is not so much does it work, but not hiring advisors is something that I do not recommend for you to do. You can get access to anybody for one hour a week. Yeah, you'll have to pay them. So nobody's going to volunteer their hour. We're all very, very busy. But hiring advisors is the biggest career amplification and your business amplification can possibly do. Because to create a network of people that have all of these data points and those all of the other patterns that you can do is something that can just propel you so far forward.

**Elena Verna** (01:02:16):
That doesn't mean you have to do everything advisor says. That's not the point. They're not the strategy setter. But they are additional input into your decision-making that you otherwise wouldn't have. You can go and hire somebody from Atlassian. You can go and hire somebody from Airbnb that have been and lived through all of this and they can help you solving your problem. So I think any growth team that does not have an advisor is a growth team that is underperforming. Because even me who I've advised so many companies, I've operated at so many companies, I don't know everything. Every time I take an operator role, I hire advisors for myself. Because that is the fastest way to learn anything, and I often see these teams that just try to figure out everything on their own and not have any advisors on their boards, so to speak.

**Elena Verna** (01:03:11):
I'm not even talking like an official board. I'm talking not even an advisory board. But you can hire somebody as a contractor that will be your advisor, I think is a huge mistake, especially in this day and age. Because we have a big asymmetry of information. In our field, there's very little available to learn because we're all very cagey because of competition. But at the end of the day, people know a lot of the stuff and how it worked for them internally, and I highly, highly encourage you to not try to wing it on your own.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:03:45):
Along those lines, there's also advice of just like, don't worry about advisors. You never know if they're going to be useful. There's all these hanger-ons that join your startup and want to help, but they're not helpful. If you give one tip for a founder or team that's interviewing advisors, looking for an advisor to vet them to help them find people that are actually great, what would your tip be?

**Elena Verna** (01:04:07):
I have actually a good one. Many advisors might not like it though. I think that you should not hire an advisor until you do some sort of workshop with them on the problem that you're experiencing. See them in action. See what kind of information they can provide to you, because any advisor that is cagey about what they know is not the type of advisor that you're going to want to have on your team. You want to have somebody that has lived through it that can talk to you, to your face about it, that is able to have hard conversations. That is able to provide you necessary examples. That is able to give you and connect dots for you for necessary patterns. So instead of just saying, "Oh, this person looks good, let me hire them as an advisor." Say, "Hey, let's have a workshop first. I have this problem. I think that you can help me fix it."

**Elena Verna** (01:04:57):
Pay them for it, whatever their rate is for that workshop, for sure. See how they actually interact with your team and then hire them on ongoing retainer bases. Because that creates an interview loop that is very practical, that is very quick to understand whether you can work with them, they can work with you, and whether they have anything to contribute to you. And then every single month evaluate whether that advisor should stay with you. Some advisors, they only need to be with the company for three months and off they go, that's fine. Some of them might stick with you for four or five years, but every single month you should go and say, did they add any value? I'm not saying that advisors should have any monetary expectations like revenue attribution, so to speak to them. But did you find value in having conversations with them? Did they offer anything valuable to you?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:05:49):
That was an awesome tip. And I could see why people would be like, "God damn. Elena, don't say that." It makes so much sense. Here we go. Number nine. Here we go.

**Elena Verna** (01:05:59):
My last one is also that I see something way too often nowadays on growth teams specifically. This is very, very gross problem. And that is too much risk averseness on growth, where you're starting to test everything. If every single one of your initiatives that you're doing on growth is an experiment, that's a problem and that is something that you should take a look at and say, what am I doing and why do I need a precise scientific measurement for every single thing that I touch in order for it to go to production or to hit the market?

**Elena Verna** (01:06:47):
It's almost like a disease, like a paralyzing disease, that slows down progress, that slows down velocity, that slows down learnings, that creates very terrible consequences to the output that growth teams produce. And it's a little bit counterintuitive, because experimentation is a way to do growth for growth teams and it's their process. Growth teams are meant to experiment, but I also think that experimenting on everything is something that is quite terrible once the team starts to get locked into that state, and it's really hard to get out of because they're then afraid to do any change until or unless that they test.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:07:39):
So where do you find that balance? I imagine people hearing this are like, oh, yes, this makes sense to me, and then they continue to test basically everything. What's kind of some heuristics you'd recommend for knowing, okay, just don't test that. Don't worry about it. You don't need credit for that win.

**Elena Verna** (01:07:52):
First of all, I think that people should trust their intuition a little bit more. Data is good, but data is only good if you have enough of it. So if you have low volume real estate, that is going to take you eight months to reach some sort of answer. Do you really want to test it for eight months? What's the point of it? My rule of thumb, if we cannot collect the sample size in the month, we shouldn't test it, period. Because it's just then it's not fast enough. We should just go and do pre versus post. Pre versus post is pretty powerful. It's also a way to assess your impact and you can still roll back if it doesn't work. But don't think that everything needs a scientific explanation to whether it needs to be moved forward or not.

**Elena Verna** (01:08:36):
Also, experimentation cannot be the way that people make decisions in the company. There's still so much about knowing your user, understanding the market for your brain to connect all of those dots and to know what needs to be an experience that your customers are going to want. That if scientific data, like a very tight determination of the probability that this is a success, it's important, absolutely do it because it might be a really big strategical pivot that you're planning to do. So it's a data point to validate that all of this extra work will be needed. It might be a very high traffic real estate that even 0.1% difference will mean millions of dollars for you.

**Elena Verna** (01:09:17):
But other than that, it should be just go, go, go. Do pre versus post. By the way, I'm not saying just release and move on. Release, do seven day, 24 hour readout, seven day readout, 28 day readout, even come back to it a year later and measure some of the retention or extension data that is associated with it.

**Elena Verna** (01:09:38):
But to test everything is debilitating to growth teams and app paralyzes them in its place. So kind of look at your initiatives and say, where do I need precision? And it's important and I can get it best in that versus where we should just go for it. And yeah, we will fail there too, and that's okay. And we can roll back and we can figure out how to make it better. But failure is going to happen regardless.

**Elena Verna** (01:10:08):
In statistics, six is tricky. Many people take it for face value versus it's just like a directional data point to say there's likely new distribution that has maybe a different mean, and 5% of the chances. If you measure in 95% statistical significance, you might not even be there, and yet really take it for so granted. Oh, it's going to drive this much lift. So I just think that people stop in this age of data, almost rely enough on their element intuition.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:10:42):
A lot of contrary intakes here. I love this. Elena, we've reached number 10. And I know number 10 is like a special one where it's more than one. Quick. Fire.

**Elena Verna** (01:10:53):
So number 10 is going to be my little fire round. My fire round on little things that I just see people spending way too much time on it. It hurts my heart, because it's not going to drive any results on them. So number one. Color optimizations. Because the love of God, a blue is a blue is a blue. As long as it's accessible and as long as it's bright enough, off you go. You do not need to test the shades of blue or test it against green or so on. Pick a color, move on, please don't spend time on it. That's an early 2000s tactic. It doesn't work anymore. We pass that in technology sector.

**Elena Verna** (01:11:26):
Number two. Third party signups. A lot of times we think, oh, we're going to get so much more acquisition if we add Google Auth or if we add Facebook Auth or Slack Auth or Microsoft Auth, whichever auth you want to add to it. In some cases, it's very important to have third party auth. So for example, if you are a developer product, please have a GitHub auth. It's kind of unnecessary. The developers already have the account there, have them connect with it as opposed to create a new one. However, if you're a productivity product, email is fine for the longest time. Gmail is nice. It's not going to drive more acquisition for you. You're just going to do a makeshift, and two more people...

**Elena Verna** (01:12:00):
... more acquisition for you. You're just going to do a makeshift and two more people using it. It's not going to create incrementality, it's not going to improve your activation, it's not going to improve your retention. It's not a growth tactic. It's part of you just customer experience that you want to invest into. Number three, on the fire round, one email wonders. We stress too much about this one email that we're going to send to this one customer group. And we're like, oh gosh, how much lift is it going to cost? It'll never cause any lift. You will never work as a one-off email. Too few people open it on average, 25% open rate. At best you'll get 40 to 50% open rate. Too few people click it. One email will never do anything. If you're going to go into email, please think about it as a series about communication, about how it interacts with product communication.

**Elena Verna** (01:12:48):
It's a whole strategy. It's a whole thing. Please don't stress about one-off email. Never test a change in one email. It'll never work. You're going to have to do the whole god damn thing and see how it's going to do. Not just one email, just never going to work.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:13:03):
I'm definitely guilty of this one. That is a really good one for sure. And it's so obvious in hindsight, so I love that you share that.

**Elena Verna** (01:13:09):
Yes. And then the last one, growth teams are often too obsessed about removing friction. Because if we remove the steps, then more people are going to get to the destination. And to an extent, if you cause horrible friction in your product where it's just confusing about what the next step is, I agree, go fix the friction of the cognitive load that it takes to complete a step. That is the friction that you should be working on. However, just removing steps or yanking or simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable of doing is a completely failed growth tactic. So simplifying may be an initiative of a different problem that you're solving, but if you ever have a line item on your roadmap that says simplified onboarding, please cross it out. It's not going to work because simplifying onboarding is an action.

**Elena Verna** (01:14:08):
What is the problem that you're solving? You're never trying to solve a problem of simplifying. You always have a problem of people are confused in it, but people don't know where to go or they get lost in it or they're not educated enough. That is the problem. And simplifying might be a solution, but it can never be a problem on its own. And too many growth teams are just obsessed with this notion that came out I think in early 2000s, like, oh, simplifying is the biggest growth hack that you can do. Do it. It's only a solution to a very specific problem set of too much complexity.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:14:48):
Wow, that was a big one to end on. That I think will help a lot of people avoid wasting time. Again, a whole other podcast conversation probably focus just on onboarding advice that you probably have, that I know you have. We've reached the last item. Is there anything else you want to share about this list before we move on?

**Elena Verna** (01:15:07):
No, I think we've spent too much time. We're ready to go.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:15:09):
Not too much. Just enough time. And kind of on a note, I want to call an audible, and so we were going to talk through all of your favorite frameworks. I like the way this conversation has gone. I don't want people to get overwhelmed with information. So one idea is just list maybe your favorite growth frameworks just for folks to go check these out and not spend too much time on each one.

**Elena Verna** (01:15:30):
Yep, let's do that.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:15:31):
Okay.

**Elena Verna** (01:15:32):
Great. So the list of my favorite growth frameworks. And to me framework by the way, it's not a solution, it's a pattern. It's a pattern that exists across almost every single company out there and it's a starting point for your ideation and to figure out how you can almost shortcut to possible list of solutions as opposed to trying to figure out too hard of how to even define a problem on its own. So number one, it's probably expected if anybody has read anything or listened to me talk is growth loops. I think anybody who thinks about growth and anybody who thinks about growth in the funnel fashion versus understanding what the growth loops are is missing out on the ability to create sustainable growth engine. So it's very important to think about action, reaction that generates another action and it's a self-contained flywheel they can spin. A lot of resources on it at Reforge, Brian Balfour and Casey Winters and Andrew Chen wrote a lot about this.

Highly recommend anybody looking into. My next favorite growth framework's actually written by you, Lenny, and Dan, which is a race car framework. Everybody has a really hard time often thinking about what are all of them parts of growth initiatives and which are long-term, short-term, how much are they going to actually produce in results? And race car framework is wonderful because it separates different initiatives into, hey, there's some engines, loops that are just going to keep on spinning. There's some fuel that you're going to need to add into it, potentially like paid marketing dollars. There are some turbo boosts that you may have in your race car that are going to be, let's say big user conferences that you're going to hold as a product or there's [inaudible 01:17:22] and optimizations that you're going to need to do pouring oil into that engine so that actually performs correctly. It's beautiful. I talk about it all the time with everybody.

**Elena Verna** (01:17:31):
The next favorite growth framework for me comes from Bengali and that's adjacent to user theory. I think that was very powerful in terms of thinking about growth evolution. And as we talked about adding different growth models to your growth ecosystem, different growth loops, but also adjacent users which are outside of your ideal customer profiles or ICP, outside of your core user and how growth team can really bring them in and add additional oomph to your product without even expansion of product market fit by just optimizing their experiences. I'm going to stop at these three because I think those are the most powerful ones.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:18:09):
Cool. On that last one, [inaudible 01:18:11] Bengali was on the podcast. We'll link to that episode if you want to go deeper on the adjacent using user theory. I love how that was a few minutes on things that could change people's life if they adopt one of these frameworks and learn how to think about growth in this way. It's such a powerful mental model for thinking about all this stuff you've been talking about this entire conversation.

**Elena Verna** (01:18:30):
Yes, those frameworks are like my church in my mind of my system of beliefs of how I think about growth and how I think about it on a strategic level of owning it as a strategy, not just like a tactic or an initiative.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:18:47):
The church of Elena Verna. Amazing. Okay, so before we wrap up, I want to bring us over to Contrarian Corner, recurring segment on this podcast where I like to ask the guest if there's something they believe that most other people don't believe. Contrarian opinion you might say. Is there anything that comes to mind?

**Elena Verna** (01:19:08):
I do have a very contrarian opinion, although it's not so much related to growth as opposed to maybe your personal growth and my contrarian opinion is that full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skill that you have. It's one of the packages that everybody should evaluate and take advantage of, but too many people blindly default to that package and don't explore other options that are both available on the market as well as best suited for their personalities, for their interests, and for their skill set. It's like a default plan that everybody subscribes to that is faulty in itself.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:19:57):
Wow. Okay. Wait, we got to hear more. So what are some other packages? I think we're buying some of these packages, these other options, but I guess what should people be thinking about when you say this in terms of what can they actually do and explore?

**Elena Verna** (01:20:08):
I'll premise it to saying I don't want to rain parade on full-time roles. They're wonderful on video ability, to learn to get the expertise and depending on which career stage you are at full-time roles might be the absolute necessity for you to move on to and unlock the next level. However, full-time roles boxes into one company that may not be a great fit for us culturally, for our skills, for our ambitions, for our interests. Life is too short for that and ability to really go and figure out your own best monetization model, just like you work on that for your business, you should work for that on yourself without an assumption oftentimes is the only option that you should have.

**Elena Verna** (01:20:56):
So what are the other options? There's so many, obviously the couple known ones. Freelancing, you can be a contractor. I do a lot of advising and consulting because for my brain of how I work and how I like to puzzle solve and pattern match, it works much better to be horizontal across many companies versus vertical on one specific one. But that doesn't mean I still don't take those vertical engagements to deepen my knowledge into any specific topic. But overall it's a lot more interesting for me to pattern match across multiple companies and help them grow as opposed to just focusing on one.

**Elena Verna** (01:21:34):
There's interim engagements where there's a predetermined end date to your agreement. There's fractional engagements where you're working part-time on something as opposed to engulfing yourself completely. There's other ways to create courses, there's a way to create newsletters and monetize them like you're doing such a fantastic job. So there's just so many options and people are sometimes paralyzed by fear of instability, that it creates when you start to explore other options because you don't have that contract with that one company that provides you that paycheck every two weeks to rely on. But at the same time you can create diversification for your career and you depend on when you need to pull that trigger and when is the right time for you to explore. But to spend your entire career only assuming full-time is the only way I think is a complete mistake that a lot of people are doing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:22:33):
One of my favorite posts of yours along these lines, which is around increasing... What you want to do is increase optionality and I guess talk about that because I think it's a really powerful piece of advice.

**Elena Verna** (01:22:46):
So this advice of career optionality, being the ultimate north star for anybody in their professional journey is something that I'm very strong on because a lot of people have the goal of, I don't know, maybe I want to be a VP or I want to become a CEO. Or I don't know, I want to be a manager and I want to people manage. And this becomes their north star and they start working towards it. But a lot of people when they get to their perceived corporate ladder north stars find themselves extremely dissatisfied, depressed even by how terrible that job is. Could people manage your job? I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy because it's a terrible job if you don't enjoy it and you don't know if you're going to like it until you actually do it.

**Elena Verna** (01:23:33):
So I think setting a title as your goal, which so many of us have titles as goals, is very wrong way to think about it as opposed to saying, "Hey, my goal professional is actually to have options so I can choose what I want to do. So I can choose what fits my life right now that I can choose what fits my skills and that fits my personality and that makes me happy."

**Elena Verna** (01:23:54):
And to get career optionality, if that's your goal, you start thinking about your progression a lot differently. You're not starting to think about it of what will get me to the next title. You start thinking about what will can I do next year that will increase my option pool? And that's very different than just getting to a higher title. And if you start thinking about evaluating opportunities or whether you should stay at the company, whether you should move at the company from the lens of does it increase my options if I stay at this company for one more year or does it keep it the same or does it actually potentially decrease? That is the right way to find your ultimate happy place and happy job that brings you energy, that brings you happiness versus just going for a title and then being very disappointed with what that brings along with it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:24:48):
Amazing advice. So important and something I'll add that I think is a balance to what people may be feeling here is like, oh, I'll just bounce around all the best logo companies and create this killer resume. I think you also need to build depth and actual experience that you can tap into if you do any of these things. For example, a lot of people want to jump to like I'm going to be a newsletter person, I'm going to start a podcast, be an advisor before they've done anything real and you have nothing to actually base your advice on and that part is very important.

**Elena Verna** (01:25:16):
You have to earn your right to unlock optionality and earning that right does usually lie within full-time jobs. That is a universal truth. But then at some point you should start not just looking at full- time jobs as the only option that you have. You should start to think about when can you start unlocking new ones and testing the market on it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:25:39):
The other point is that you've been a great example of is it's not a one-way door. You can have full-time job, go to something else, go back to full-time job, be an advisor, be an intern person, be a newsletter person. You do that really well.

**Elena Verna** (01:25:53):
You should have to do it all. It's all a menu of options and you pick a menu item that fits your best in any given point of your life. It's never say never and never shut the door on anything. Absolutely.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:26:03):
Oh my god, Elena, this was incredible. Before we get to our very exciting lighting round, is there anything else you want to share or leave listeners with, maybe a last nugget or thought or not because covered a lot already.

**Elena Verna** (01:26:13):
No, I think we've covered so much. I don't want to overwhelm.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:26:16):
Let's do it. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

**Elena Verna** (01:26:21):
Yes, I'm ready.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:26:22):
First question, surprise, surprise. What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people?

**Elena Verna** (01:26:27):
Okay, so I just finished this book that I love so much, it's not a professional book, but it's Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. It's the same author that wrote Martian. Martian also was made into a movie. So good, so good. Can't put it down. I think I read it like two days straight. So highly recommend that. And the next one that I also started reading right now is Body Burst. Body Burst is so good. It's actually takes into account AI and how we can upload our consciousness in AI and what can happen with that. So highly recommend that, I think it's actually closer to what potentially can be in the truth for us in the future than not. But I'm a big sci-fi geek, so I read mostly sci-fi books.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:27:14):
**Elena Verna** (01:27:14):
No, I have not.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:27:29):
Okay. It's described as not a sci-fi but space, like a space opera where it's epic, the most epic scale of universe story.

**Elena Verna** (01:27:38):
I'll download it tonight, it'll be on my list.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:27:41):
It takes a little bit to get into. It's quite unique, but you just keep going and it's incredible and AI plays a big role in it actually.

**Elena Verna** (01:27:48):
That's awesome. I'll download it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:27:49):
There you go. Okay, question number two. Favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

**Elena Verna** (01:27:55):
Yes. I just got to watching Beef on Netflix. It's so good. I'm not going to spoil it for anybody, Beef. You should watch it. It's a limited series. It's so good. It will run through. I love Veep on HBO. So funny. I've probably watched it two times already the entire series and I'll probably watch it more because it just cracks me up every time. I think this is actually how our government works, so I'm very intrigued by that. And then the last one that I really liked that is coming up with the season two now. So you should catch up with season one is Last One of Us. If you don't like zombie movies or zombie shows, don't watch it. But if zombie and apocalypse is your cup of tea, Last One of Us is so good.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:28:44):
Or the Last of Us? Or Last One of Us? Last of Us.

**Elena Verna** (01:28:44):
Is it Last of Us?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:28:48):
I'm Googling while we talk, Last of Us. I think it's Last of Us. Yeah, the Last of Us.

**Elena Verna** (01:28:53):
Oh, Last of Us. Okay, Last of Us.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:28:56):
You're saying there's a third season coming soon. That's exciting. I didn't know that.

**Elena Verna** (01:28:58):
Yeah, it's so good.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:29:00):
Okay, I love it as well. Great pick. Okay. Your favorite product you recently discovered that you really like?

**Elena Verna** (01:29:08):
I recently discovered that they make heated shoes and that changed my life. My feet are always cold and they are boots that actually have heated wires through them and I'm obsessed.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:29:22):
And are you like charging it, like USB plugin kind of thing?

**Elena Verna** (01:29:25):
Yeah, I just come in, I plug them in and then I go outside and I'm warm and I think it's magical. I have a jacket, also heated jacket, now I have shoes. I just need my gloves and I'll be all set.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:29:40):
I love the USB powered clothing. And we should know you live not in Silicon Valley, you live on the East Coast sort of?

**Elena Verna** (01:29:46):
Central. In Central. The coldest it gets is 30s here, but I'm always cold, so this is just my love language is something heated that I can sit on. I'm that cat sits underneath the light all the time. And then I also just got AirPod Max, my headphones. I couldn't connect it to my computer. Still technical issues on that, but I love them. The sound is amazing. That's my new favorite gadget that I'm obsessed about.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:30:14):
What a cool combination, heated shoes and AirPods. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to that you find useful in work and life?

**Elena Verna** (01:30:25):
Yeah, it's really one, progress over perfection. I think that you just need to... The velocity of information is far more important than something that I think is perfect and perfection is an outcome that you get to. But progress over perfection all day, any day.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:30:47):
Very appropriate for a head of growth person.

**Elena Verna** (01:30:51):
Yes.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:30:51):
Final question. You're not only one of the smartest people I've met on growth, you're also one of the funniest people on social media, especially on LinkedIn. If people aren't following you, they should. They will not only learn, they'll also be highly entertained. Is there a favorite meme that you created that you are very proud of that you can describe that we might want to link to?

**Elena Verna** (01:31:13):
Yeah, so I also want to say a lot of people hate me for doing so much memes as well because they think it's not serious. And I actually, I want to rebuttal that really quickly because I think humor is the best way to disarm people and to point out very painful situations that we're facing with every single day or conundrums without putting anybody on defense. Because we can all laugh at the absurdity of the lives that we live in every single day. And a picture's worth a thousand words. And sometimes memes are just the best way to communicate the most complex situations that we are facing within our corporate world. And they help us understand how common all of those situations are. We're not unique. You're not feeling alone by feeling down about what happened. Everybody's going through the same thing. So that's why I love memes because they help connect people on both sides.

**Elena Verna** (01:32:05):
Even if you're making fun of one side because they're like, yeah, that is true and this is so funny. So I'm a big proponent of that just because I think it's actually a better way to both unite people and just talk about hard problems that otherwise would be not read if you put it in words.

But my favorite meme is actually one of the first ones that I've created and I think it's from Family Guy where they have an elephant and the penguin standing and then there's Moses I think, or some biblical character saying, "What the hell is this?" Looking at the elephant and the penguin. And the result of it is a child that has a penguin body and an elephant head. And if you think about elephant as product and penguin as marketing, what the hell is this is gross. Which is a byproduct, a weird, weird byproduct, product and marketing merged together that doesn't really fit with either, yet it's its own entity. I don't know. I think that that's the best to describe to people what [inaudible 01:33:14] is.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:33:14):
So appropriate. Also, it's hard to describe a meme and make it feel funny. So good job. Thank you for doing that. We'll link to this meme in our show notes. Elena, this was incredible. Thank you again. Thank you for being our first ever third return guest. Hopefully there will be many more episodes of Elena Verna. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be useful to you?

**Elena Verna** (01:33:37):
Find me on LinkedIn or my Substack. I'm not competing with you Lenny, but I share a lot of my thoughts and everything that I learned on my own Substack. It's just elenaverna.com. LinkedIn is for all of my memes, so go there if you want to laugh, but if you want to learn from what I'm learning, go to my Substack. And how you can be useful? Tell me what problems you're facing now. Don't tell me, oh, how growth is slowing down, what should I do? I can't help you with that, too broad, but if you're having a situation, there's often really good [inaudible 01:34:09] for me to go and write about it or to do more research about it. So I just love to hear what some people's minds, so I can both help them connect their dots as well as learn about it myself.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:34:20):
And what's the best way for them to do that? Is it like DM me on LinkedIn, any other-

**Elena Verna** (01:34:24):
DM me on LinkedIn or just reply to my Substack newsletter email. It goes directly into my personal inbox, so I read every single one of them.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:34:32):
That's a really good tip. People don't know that when you get an email on Substack, if you reply, just goes straight to the author.

**Elena Verna** (01:34:37):
Exactly.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:34:38):
Elena, thank you so much for being here.

**Elena Verna** (01:34:41):
Okay, thank you for having me, Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:34:43):
Bye everyone.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (01:34:45):
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at LennysPodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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## [7/8] Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid

**Lenny** (00:00:03):
If you're a product manager, you've almost certainly come across one of Brandon Chu's Medium posts. His writing about all aspects of the job is some of the best writing out there on the skills of being a PM, and has informed a lot of my thinking on both product management and writing. Brandon is currently a VP of Product at Shopify, where he's been for seven years, and in our conversation, we talk about what it's like to build product at Shopify, what Shopify has learned about being effective working remotely, having done it from day one, the impact of writing on one's career and how to get started, the benefits of becoming a platform PM, the manager track versus the IC track, and a bunch of other stuff. Brandon is a wealth of knowledge on the art of product management, and I'm really excited to bring this episode to you.

**Lenny** (00:00:46):
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**Lenny** (00:01:52):
This episode is brought to you by Persona. Persona helps founders, product managers, and engineers easily solve any identity related problem, including handling KYC, AML, and basically all manner of identity fraud. You can integrate Persona in an afternoon, and personalize your flows using their SDK to meet your users on any device. Persona's identity building blocks allow you to manage your entire end to end onboarding flow, verifying that each new user and their data are legitimate. Persona is trusted by both startups and the world's largest companies, including Square, BlockFi, Gusto, and Udemy. And for a limited time, Persona is offering listeners of this podcast a free end to end KYC and AML solution, where you can collect the user's government ID and/or their selfie, and automatically verify that those two pieces of data are legitimate. You can also enrich that information to automatically see if the person exists on various watch lists. Just go to withpersona.com/lenny to get started. Brandon, thank you so much for joining me.

**Brandon Chu** (00:03:01):
Hey, Lenny. Thanks for having me.

**Lenny** (00:03:03):
I'm curious. When you were younger, what did you want to be when you grew up?

**Brandon Chu** (00:03:06):
An astronaut.

**Lenny** (00:03:07):
Say more.

**Brandon Chu** (00:03:08):
I've always just had a longing for space. I have a vision in my mind, and I still think I'm going to do this. One day, I'm going to see the whole earth in one view, and it's going to make me feel... This is going to sound weird... But make me feel really small, which I think will make me feel connected. And so, even since I was 16, I've been saving 2,000 dollars a year in a separate account that I just invest into the market, because I calculated that it would cost half a million dollars by the time I was 55, and I think it's going to actually work out timing-wise, because it's like the cost is coming close.

**Lenny** (00:03:40):
This is an amazing story. That's a very PM-y way of approaching it. Just start putting money away.

**Brandon Chu** (00:03:44):
I guess so.

**Lenny** (00:03:45):
Plan for going to space, hoping the tech would catch up. This is going to be a great podcast V2 when you're on your way to space.

**Brandon Chu** (00:03:51):
Yeah. We'll do it for sure. I'll bring my Starlink up there.

**Lenny** (00:03:54):
I just got an email from Starlink that you can now move your Starlink around and get internet as you move.

**Brandon Chu** (00:03:58):
Oh, that's amazing. So they're going to have a mount on Teslas and you just plug it into your Tesla and just, yeah.

**Lenny** (00:04:04):
Exactly. It's all coming together. Okay. So you wanted to be an astronaut, eventually got into product. I love to hear... I like that segue. I got into product initially and then just kind your journey to where you are today, which is VP of Product at Shopify.

**Brandon Chu** (00:04:19):
So way back in university, I kind of grew up actually in the era where people really wanted to work on Wall Street still. So I actually came up through the finance ranks and stuff like that. And I worked in industry at Kraft Foods of all places for about four years, but how I kind of broke into product management is I got really bored that really quickly. And I started moonlighting and bootstrapping a startup on the side and it was called Tunezy and it helped YouTube musicians at the time, which were blowing up. This is kind of when Justin Bieber was becoming famous by doing webcam cover music and stuff like that. And we helped YouTube musicians monetize their fan bases by offering fan experiences at their tour stops. And so this was really early. This is before YouTube even had a music category. And so my co-founder and I, neither of us were technical, but we were pretty good at pitching.

**Brandon Chu** (00:05:08):
And so we kind of entered a lot of startup competitions and we got some funding and some office space and we quit our jobs literally the weekend after we won that. And then fast forward three and a half, four years, we never really made a really big company out of it, but we kind of soft landed sold the company. And I'd say that's my first foray because my job as a co-founder there was really to work with engineering and design. And it was through that experience that I learned everything about product and I got a lot more technical too. I was able to do a little bit on the front end. And so from that, after the acquisition and the integration that parlayed that into product management career basically. So I joined a growth stage startup in Canada, in Toronto called FreshBooks, which is still around today.

**Brandon Chu** (00:05:50):
They're a Series D company now. And I kind of learned the chops of product management there because the folks there were X Microsoft 15 years, really technical, process-oriented and framework heavy product management. And I had my just scrappy entrepreneurial experience. So I kind of hardened my PM skills through that over about four years. And then I joined Shopify the week of the IPO actually. So that's almost seven years ago and it was one of the largest companies I ever worked at. I had 500 people even then at least because I'd been in startups prior. So I thought maybe the story's over.- But as I met Tobi through my interview process, I realized that that was definitely not true. And it obviously is not true now.

So yeah. I've been seven years there, various PM roles, areas of the product and then eventually really started to build some domain expertise around platform management and developer ecosystems and kind of grew my career there. And through that domain, became product director and then a VP of product. And then in classic Shopify form, I completely threw it all away and started something a little different inside the company 18 months ago. So now I lead what we call product acceleration, which is the team that does all of Shopify's investments and then [inaudible 00:07:02].

**Lenny** (00:07:02):
Amazing. So I was looking at your LinkedIn and just hearing this story, especially the Shopify piece, it's a pretty incredible trajectory. And imagine a lot of people listening to this may be like, "Shit. How do I follow a similar path? How do I do it Brandon did." Do you have any advice about what it was that helped you, either habits, skills, behaviors that helped you get to where you're today that maybe newer PMs could learn from?

**Brandon Chu** (00:07:26):
I think what I learned over the arc of my career is that especially when it comes to product management specifically, it's a lot of the hard skills that PMs are known for, so organizational, analytical, good communication, even technical skills. There's sort of table stakes and commodities to be an entry level PM. And to be clear, it's not easy to be a PM. It's not an entry level job. And so that is no knock on that. I'm saying to grow beyond that though, I think domain expertise can take you a little bit further like if you're an amazing payments PM or you have some really nuanced knowledge and whatever, 3D modeling or something like that.

**Brandon Chu** (00:08:05):
But I think ultimately to have the highest trajectory and what certainly was a tailwind for my career was you guys have to lean into those founder skills. And so things like being a great storyteller, how to get the most out of people around you, foster creative and motivated teams and know how to make really, really hard high conviction decisions that actually can't be solved. You got to take a leap of faith and how to do that and bring teams through that type of ambiguity and then how to lead by example and have accountability when you make those choices. So I found that ultimately, those really became the things that were limiters for some careers I observed and then were definitely propelling for a lot of the people that made it to high level of leadership.

**Lenny** (00:08:47):
Awesome. And I know you wrote a lot about a lot of these things, which we'll talk about your writing, which I'm a huge fan of and I have been a fan for a long time. But before we get into those, I want to chat a little bit about Shopify and your experience at Shopify and just understanding the product culture at Shopify. As an outsider, Shopify feels like an incredibly strong product culture. And I know a lot of amazing PMs that work there and even outside PMs, just generally amazing people. What would you say are some of the defining characteristics of how teams build product at Shopify maybe that are different from how other companies approach product?

**Brandon Chu** (00:09:20):
Shopify has an incredibly strong product culture. Whether it's uniquely different, I can't know for sure, but I would say I'd start with, it's a highly technical company. That's not unique, but it's just something that should be known about Shopify. When I joined, all project management was just in GitHub, just commenting on poll requests and even marketers in order to augment or upload a blog post, you'd have to commit and deploy it. So there was no breaks given for folks that didn't want to touch code and stuff like that. I think it was very much and this all stems from Tobi, a very well renowned developer in the Rails Core community and it all kind of flowed from him.

**Brandon Chu** (00:09:59):
And so because of that, I think everyone in the company had their hands really deep in the product regardless of what function you are, which brings me the second thing I think is really awesome with Shopify, when it comes to how the product org works, it's that we don't actually put the product org on a pedestal as the only people that can have an opinion about the product or should be listened to when we think about what should be built. There's sort of an understanding of Shopify that everyone at the company from engineers to support, to sales, everyone's responsible for product thinking and it's not just the area for a small group of PMs.

**Brandon Chu** (00:10:38):
And so that's some of the foundations of it. And again, all stems from Tobi. I'd say the last one is that this comes from the fact that we have Canadian roots. And I say that actually in a way that's almost opposite of the stereotype when it comes to tech anyway. There has been a lot of failed tech companies in Canada and no company that's ever truly been global. And so ambition and a founder mentality has been something that we've architected the culture of the product team around. And so 30 to 40% of the PM team are ex founders either through failed startups or through acquisition.

**Brandon Chu** (00:11:15):
And this is really important to us for obvious reasons about just versatility and grit and growth mindset but then also we are building a platform for other entrepreneurs, whether they're merchants on our platform or developers to build their own stuff. And so we have a lot of empathy for our customers through that. And so the way this is all kind of coalesced is the one liner job description we give to PMs as they come in is "Your job is to help teams ship the right thing at the right time in the right way." And it really comes down to two main concepts. There's help teams. So it's like servant leadership. You're not necessarily the CEO of the product. You're not dictator. Everyone's responsible for product thinking and you're there to help the team get to ultimately the right thing. And that is what you are accountable for.

**Lenny** (00:12:00):
I love that definition. In practice, do you give PMs a little bit more sway over decisions or do you try to keep it completely equal amongst functions?

**Brandon Chu** (00:12:10):
Actually, I think it depends on the level. So I think as you go to towards more the junior PMs and the ICs, there is a much bigger emphasis on balanced decision making between all the Kraft's user experience and engineering, of course. And then it's more when you get to director level or above, that's when there is more emphasis put on where the PM wants to lead, because ultimately, it becomes a pure strategic function at that point and that is your only job. Your only job is to say, "We need to go there and my ass is online for us going there." And so that is something I think we matured into. There was obviously lots of tension as we grew of, "Hey. We used to collaborate, but now you're saying we have to do this thing." And it's like, well, actually, the company, the context changed, my role changed and we have to do something and it has to be someone's job to make that choice. So it's a bit of both is the answer.

**Lenny** (00:13:05):
Awesome. Spending a little more time on decision making in general at Shopify. Is there kind of a framework or a specific process you guys use to make bigger decisions?

**Brandon Chu** (00:13:15):
What we do have is an annual planning cycle basically, we call investment plans and it's for fairly large SWOTs to the organization. I'm talking like 20% chunks of all of Shopify consolidated under a VP here and there to put forward a vision for what that team's going to accomplish that year, whether that is a directional change or even specific outcomes in some cases. And we spend time aligning with both Tobi, the rest of the C level exec team, even sometimes the board on what that is and what headcount may go with that and what not. But that's sort of the main arc of planning. What happens after that is just chaos, all the teams underneath and like I said, one fifth of Shopify may be moving towards one investment plan, that's at this scale almost 2500 people. Right? So they're all now chaotically moving towards those end goals and iterating through ideas good and bad.

**Brandon Chu** (00:14:15):
And so this is actually where Shopify is a really hard place too, because we do this because we recognize a couple things. One is it's important that we set broad direction, so everyone can put their energy towards the right place. But we also want a place where we're hiring smart people so that they can figure out what to do. And we also know that in software and in tech and in this world, things change so rapidly. So don't even kid yourself that we're going to plan out everything we're going to have to do for the next year to get there. And so we set this directional kind of outcome and vision based kind of north star for where we want to go. Then product directors start to basically shoot their shot and say, "This is how my group can contribute to those things. Here's what we're going to try to commit to in the next quarter basically."

**Brandon Chu** (00:14:58):
And it's through that almost back and forth, the trust battery thing that I was talking about plays in. Again, they're selling it to their peers, the engineering directors. They're selling it to the VPs. They're selling it to the broad team as well to get momentum behind it and to say, "You know what? This feels right. Let's start doing that." But what's really amazing and also difficult about Shopify though is we're pretty good at never falling into sunk-cost fallacy. So we'll throw it all away anytime if the world changes. Right?

**Brandon Chu** (00:15:29):
And so that's why it's actually a really tricky place for a lot of folks because there are cases and it's happened to me many times where it's just like you're building three, six months into something and it's just not important anymore or the world changed. And so that's kind of how the sausage gets made. And it really comes down to giving teams the agency, giving product folks at certain levels the responsibility to make a bet, and then having the humility to understand that soccer's hard, the world changes and that we always have to ask ourselves this is the most important thing that we can do right now.

**Lenny** (00:16:03):
It's so important. A lot of companies just want to avoid upsetting people, want to avoid creating chaos. And it's so important to always be rethinking even if it's like we just put a plan together, maybe we should change it because things have changed. And so I'm not surprised Shopify is really good at this.

**Brandon Chu** (00:16:20):
To give an example, during COVID, this cultural resilience we had to change was so vital because all of a sudden, these grandiose ideas and visions we had for 2020 didn't matter and what mattered was like, "Oh, shit. Retail businesses are going from a hundred percent to zero." It's like 0% revenue overnight. And how do we help a brick and mortar store across the street now do order online and pick up it in store? How do we do that? How do we throw away everything? This is what matters now. Let's try to ship three things in the next month that matter." And that's very jarring, I think, unless you have a culture that just understands that can happen any day and it kind of gets excited by those.

**Lenny** (00:17:02):
I'd love to actually hear whatever you could share on the COVID period of Shopify and just what folks did to work through that.

**Brandon Chu** (00:17:08):
Yeah. Through all the roadmaps, we asked ourselves, "Hey. Our customers, their livelihoods are at risk right now." And this is when no one knew it would actually be a tailwind for e-commerce. Right? We didn't know the severity of COVID. It could have been a really, really bad pandemic from a death rate perspective. So no one's betting like, "Oh, everyone's going to stay home for two years and everyone's going to buy stuff online." Everyone's like, "Okay. All our customers are going to go to zero, unless we help them figure out how to actually survive through this."

**Brandon Chu** (00:17:40):
And so of course, online only merchants or merchants who were well established online have that infrastructure. There wasn't supply chain issues yet. So they're good. The focus then turned, of course, to all these both hybrid brick and mortar online customers and customers that are only brick and mortar. And so we did all those things. Some restaurants and grocery stores on the platform, how do we help them do exactly that buy online, pick up at the curb? How do we help them launch buy gift cards now at a discount so that basically you can, as a consumer, help these companies stay afloat. If you recall back in 2020, that was a huge thing. Buy gift cards at the restaurant you like, because if you don't, it might not exist.

**Lenny** (00:18:22):
I did that a bunch. I remember. Yeah.

**Brandon Chu** (00:18:24):
So these things exist on Shopify in apps because they were never really mission critical, but now it became really mission critical. So all of a sudden we're trying to gear 500 people towards ship gift cards, which sounds like a really small feature, but it's pretty hard when you have millions of merchants and hundreds of millions of consumers using your platform every day, ship it in two weeks. And so it became war time truly. And yes, Tobi got way more involved, as did Craig Miller, our CPO at the time. And we went down from trying to ship maybe the 40 things that quarter to three and nothing else mattered. And that became the rhythm of the company for almost that entire year.

**Lenny** (00:19:09):
Wow. How long did that kind of war time period last internally?

**Brandon Chu** (00:19:13):
I'd say the edge came off a little bit I think mid 2021. It wasn't that long ago actually, maybe about a year ago that it started. I would say it never really left war time per se, but everyone sort of adjusted to it. And so many other things were happening because we had offices before and we made the decision very early in the pandemic to say, "We're never going to have offices again. We're a digital by default company. Hire anywhere in the world, but let's make sure we have really great infrastructure." And so there was so many things happening inside the company that just changed. It really changed overnight. Shopify, the experience, the culture of the company changed overnight. And so it's hard to say when it stopped, it just evolved.

**Lenny** (00:19:58):
I wanted to actually ask about that and so I'm glad you brought that up. The fact that Shopify's been very remote friendly for a long time, I imagine it's rooted in the fact that it was founded in Ottawa and it's probably hard to hire the scale of people that you're all hiring out of Ottawa. And I imagine there was an advantage to having a lot of that experience working remotely in this new modern world. And I also imagine wasn't easy still, but what I'm curious about is what sorts of things have you learned about working remotely that you can share that other companies can maybe learn from Shopify's experience?

**Brandon Chu** (00:20:31):
Finding enough that in-person still matters. It does. And that doesn't mean we're rolling back at all the fact that we're remote only, but what we've done is we've actually instituted with something we call bursts. So bursts at Shopify are the ability for your team generally maybe once a quarter or whatnot, to just come together to do really high velocity creative work together, to hang out together. And so we've gone pretty far on this where we actually have in-house built web and mobile apps that allow teams to one click, say I have 20 people. We want to do a burst in Laguna Beach and then click the button and then flights get booked, hotels get booked, food is taken care of. No one has to pay any. There's no expenses that go back and forth. The app itself helps you check into those places.

**Brandon Chu** (00:21:24):
And we have really cool experiences. And in France and Ireland, I'll leave a little bit to the imagination, but it's really cool. So we started allowing kind of that as the world opened up for travel and now teams are doing it all the time. I'm going next week actually to one with our team.

**Lenny** (00:21:24):
You just do a personal burst. I just want to go to The Bahamas first.

**Brandon Chu** (00:21:46):
You can try. We've done other things too, because you spoke in Bahamas. I actually worked out of the Caribbean for five weeks in March. And because we also had a policy that we instituted that said for 90 days out of the year, you can work in any country you want. And so what we tried to do with a remote only world is we tried to turn all the weaknesses on its head and to say, "Okay. Well, we can't see each other every day, but let's remember all the ways that sucked from a commute perspective and even when you were together, if you were just working in your desk and never even talking to each other, that wasn't great. So why don't we just optimize for the stuff that was amazing about it and make it super easy and fun?"

**Brandon Chu** (00:22:23):
And that's what bursts became. And then, hey, we have amazing infrastructure now. We can work with global teams 24/7/365. Why are we forcing people to stay in a location? The reality is the 98 thing is mostly because of a tax thing, but ultimately, we have the infrastructure that people can just log in from wherever. And so why not lean into.

**Lenny** (00:22:44):
Yeah. This is really interesting. I love that your answer to how to work remotely better is get together more often, which I hear a lot from companies, but I love that you've built this infrastructure to enable it. I'd love to hear a bit more of how this product works. Is it all in-house? Any advice I guess, for anyone trying to build something like this?

**Brandon Chu** (00:23:01):
I hate saying that it is all in-house because that is not easy, really accessible for midsize or below companies, but basically, you initiate an event called the burst. You can choose what type of thing you're trying to do, whether it's a pure work thing or you want to have a little bit of activity and social aspects of it. There's different locations, depending on how many people are going that are available to you. There's a booking system. If you choose to do something a little more low key and just meet in, let's say a major city, then we actually allow you to access our old offices. So the leases didn't go away. So we had to use these offices for something and these offices have now completely been retrofitted. They're beautiful. And they are amazing. I wouldn't even say co-working spaces. They're just community spaces now that you go in and you can use them and you have everything. There's food there. There used to be there's board rooms and whatever you want to have your little offsite or whatever it may be.

**Brandon Chu** (00:24:01):
And then there's a rating system after. How is the burst there? There's a whole team that manages the logistics of all these things. So that it's very just like we don't have managers all over the company trying to figure out flight plans and stuff like that. And yeah. It's great. And we also get the data to be able to see, hey, what teams haven't been together in a very long time? And ask the lead, "Hey. Why is that? Is it because everything's good and people are busy? Maybe something about a baby or something like that and they can't get around." Or is it a prompt that, "Hey, maybe your energy is low as a team, it's time to get together." So that's the benefit I think of having built that app and that infrastructure is that we get to really understand how it's actually helping.

**Lenny** (00:24:42):
This episode is brought to you by PostHog. PostHog offers a suite of product analysis tools, including funnels, heat maps, session recording and experimentation all in one easy to use platform. PostHog is open sourced so you can host it on your own infrastructure, which means that you have control over who has access to your data and makes regulatory compliance a breeze because you don't need to send user info to third parties. PostHog's app system works seamlessly with your data warehouse, both for importing and exporting data, which enables you to bring your data into one place and easily understand user behavior across a range of touchpoints. If you'd like to learn more, check them out at posthog.com/lenny. Just one last technical question about this product because it's so cool. Is there an API that just books flights or does it just send you to kayak and you book these flights?

**Brandon Chu** (00:25:31):
I don't know the exact answer, but I would imagine. So we also use trip actions inside of Shopify and I'm pretty sure they have an API, so probably we've done something directly with them. So they've handled all the really complex stuff, but we probably use them for the booking action itself.

**Lenny** (00:25:47):
Okay. Sweet. This is super interesting. I've never heard of this. I want to transition to talk a little bit about your writing. So your writing is how I originally discovered you. It's on the top, I don't know, 1% of most useful, actionable, interesting writing on the Kraft Food product management. I still refer to it often and share it with people all the time and it says a lot, because it's a little older at this point and you've kind of slowed down the writing. I'm curious when you were in that writing phase, a lot of people want to write, a lot of people know that it's good for many reasons, but a lot of people don't do it. What would you say worked well for you when you were in that period to get you to actually get stuff written and also just create time for writing?

**Brandon Chu** (00:26:27):
Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you. That's super generous. I think if you say I'm in the top 1%, then Lenny, you're definitely in the top 0.1 or 0.01% and so kudos to you.

**Lenny** (00:26:27):
I aspire to be you.

**Brandon Chu** (00:26:41):
And also thank you for being generous saying I've slowed down a bit. The reality is I haven't written anything since 2018. So when I reflect on it, I think I wrote those in a time where I was figuring out a lot of stuff while I was executing. And I wanted to crystallize in my mind some mental models and frameworks that had been forming somewhat intuitively. The funny thing about those posts when I reflect on them and I've rarely reread them, but every once in a while, someone shares an excerpt and I end up kind of rereading and be like, "Do I even believe this still?" But when people read them, they think like, "Oh, they're learning from someone who's figured it out for a while and now they're sharing it later in their career or something."

**Brandon Chu** (00:27:21):
But the reality is, and maybe this resonates with you. It's like I figured out everything in those posts at the exact moment I wrote them. It was the writing process itself that actually allowed me to solidify those mental models and those frameworks in my mind. And so I wasn't ahead of the game in any way. It was just I think I really wanted to disambiguate the chaos in my mind about what my job was. And it took me to really interesting places. And I think it was also coupled with two things, which was I had a really good career trajectory at the same time so I could actually observe. I wasn't too mired in being a PM one for five years and then moving. I was moving through things really quickly so I was able to contrast things because it was literally like, "Oh wait, three months ago, it was that. Now, how do I change?"

**Brandon Chu** (00:28:03):
And that, of course, is not just me, but it's also at Shopify I grew so much during that time. Right? We grew seven years ago. I came at just under 500 people. Were over 12,000 people today. And so it was a really formative time for the whole company and definitely myself. And in terms of just writing well and shipping quality posts and stuff like that, I'm sure this resonates with you. You just got to put in the work. You got to put in a lot of hours. I put 40 hours into a post, do it on the weekends or I brain dumped a first draft of it in two hours and drew 38 hours of editing or getting feedback from people or drawing some diagrams that I put in there. But it was that process.

**Brandon Chu** (00:28:44):
And I think it was such an amazing thing to learn how to do is to just sit and write for five hours and reread the thing and actually also get feedback from people. Don't be so afraid to share raw, early thoughts and for it to not make sense but then when you give to someone objective and they read it, they'll be like, you really learn things about how you put a narrative together in your mind versus how someone actually reacts to it. And so that fearlessness to get a lot of feedback, I think, was something I developed through those years.

**Lenny** (00:29:14):
Everything you said 100% resonates with my approach. There's a quote I often think about. It might be Hemingway or might be misattributed to Hemingway that "I don't know what I think until I've written it down." And that's exactly how I feel like it's a forcing function to help you actually figure out something. And that's exactly how I started.

**Brandon Chu** (00:29:33):
And it's a release too, because when you write it down, you just kind of release it from your mind. It's not floating around there because I'm scared to lose it or something like that. And you kind of just now you cleared your mind and you can actually think. You build on top of that knowledge into something else.

**Lenny** (00:29:48):
That's exactly how I felt when I first started writing. I just want to get these things out of my head before I forget them partly to help crystallize something that I can actually hold onto that won't fade away.

**Brandon Chu** (00:29:57):
Okay. How many posts have you written now?

**Lenny** (00:29:59):
I think probably 300.

**Brandon Chu** (00:30:01):
300. How are you still motivated to, or where do you even find things to write about now?

**Lenny** (00:30:07):
So I have a endless list of things I want to write about. And partly, these ideas come from founders and PMs that are constantly sending me questions that they have. And the way I see it is until nobody has any more questions to ask about starting a company, building a product, driving growth, I'm going to have things to write about.

**Brandon Chu** (00:30:27):
That's amazing.

**Lenny** (00:30:28):
And it feels like that's an endless supply. The bigger challenges, it gets harder and harder because the easier stuff is getting knocked out. And so that's the bigger challenges. Things remaining are things that take more time, more research, more digging, things like that. But at this point, yeah, I've been doing it for over three years and still got plenty of ideas.

**Brandon Chu** (00:30:48):
[inaudible 00:30:48].

**Lenny** (00:30:47):
And there's no better motivator than somebody paying you for your content and [inaudible 00:30:51].

**Brandon Chu** (00:30:51):
Well, it's a symbiotic relationship.Right? All those questions and feedback from your subscribers and whatnot is fodder for the next thing that you're going to give. And I think that's an amazing relationship.

**Lenny** (00:31:02):
That's exactly right. I wanted to ask you, do you think every PM/leader should spend time writing? Who should? Who shouldn't? What are you feeling on that?

**Brandon Chu** (00:31:10):
I think yes. Even if it's not to be publicly shared or whatnot, I think ultimately, especially in a increasingly digital world and increasingly remote world, you've got to be able to articulate yourself. Again, even going back to that process of writing and what it does for how you understand what you're saying, you owe your team, your peers, your stakeholders that level of clarity. So even if you write it and throw away, you've created a clarity in your mind and you can articulate it as such and people deserve that. And I think that if you're going to be a really good PM, you have to have that skill.

**Lenny** (00:31:45):
What impact have you seen as a result of your writing that you've done?

**Brandon Chu** (00:31:49):
Oh, it's honestly been the most important thing I've ever done in my career unbelievably. And it's had probably two really interesting effects. One is that as Shopify grew and when we were going through hyperscale, you probably recognize this from your Airbnb days as well but people are falling from the sky. Every day there's 20 new people showing up and you having been there already, now you got to figure out what all these people are doing and give them all the context and all these types of things. And how do you even teach them the culture and the ways that you work and stuff like this. And so one amazing, and just the context, I'm really old at Shopify now. I'm like 99.1% tenure. So I'm ancient at the company.

**Lenny** (00:32:30):
Is there a stat that shows up? Is there a little dashboard?

**Brandon Chu** (00:32:32):
There is in our little internal wiki thing.

**Lenny** (00:32:35):
[inaudible 00:32:35].

**Brandon Chu** (00:32:34):
So I'm literally ancient in the company. And so one of the amazing effects that the writing had was that people that would join my team already knew how I thought. It was pretty onboarded a lot of the PMs that would join my team because obviously, they're going to look for who their leads is and Google that a bit and they see a posting and be like, "Is this person legit or not or whatever?" And so I didn't really even have to onboard many people in so many ways. They kind of knew how I thought about the world. And also, even when I was in Shopify and writing those posts, there's so much noise in Shopify. It's a very chaotic place. There's so many exciting things happening that it is very hard to tell a 200 person PM org, "Stop. Pay attention to this idea."

**Brandon Chu** (00:33:20):
So I actually found that writing externally and getting momentum externally was a better way to influence internally what was happening, to the effect that Tobi would read my post here and there and he'd be like, "Great post." And I'd be like, "Hey, daddy loves me." But no, but seriously, it would help build my trust battery with Tobi because of the way that those posts gain traction and whatnot. So it has had an incredible, incredible impact on my personal career. And also I think it has brought a lot of really great people to Shopify. Literally every week a new PM messages me and says like, "Hey. I just joined. Your post had a lot of influence on me or whatever. And I'd love to meet up and blah, blah, blah." But that has been amazing and it's so rewarding. Another small example, this wasn't in the black box, product management like general cannon or whatever per se, but I was working on the integration product with Facebook Messenger via Shopify.

**Brandon Chu** (00:34:16):
And as part of our launch, I wrote just to get more, because we're a very small company than them. So we're using any angle we can. So I'm writing on my personal blog about this thing that we launched and David Marcus, who's now leading their blockchain crypto stuff, but he was CEO of PayPal for a while. And then he came in to lead all the Facebook's payment stuff and Messenger. Oh, sorry. Kind of lead Messenger. Anyway, he shared it on his Facebook and on Twitter. And then that blew up and all of a sudden, the CPO of Shopify, Craig or whatever, now starts thinking I'm legit even though... Because someone of his caliber was also sharing these things, about a product that we built and whatnot. So it was just really interesting how these little things had an impact on how people perceive you and thus how much impact and momentum you can create inside a company.

**Lenny** (00:35:08):
If you think about it, say you spend 40 hours on that post, what are or why that is spending a week or two writing something and the impact that could have on your perception within the company on your future career opportunities and even just people joining the company and that are going to work for you. They're like, "Oh my God, I'm going to work for Brandon Chu. I'm so excited."

**Brandon Chu** (00:35:28):
I'd say even if it never got picked up, the ROI is already huge because it just again helps you refine how you talk about the work and the decisions, but that aside, it accelerated my career probably a decade.

**Lenny** (00:35:41):
That's a really good point. You should not be focused on this needs to go viral for this to be worth the time because I find that the more you think about that, the less well it does because that becomes the wrong intent.

**Brandon Chu** (00:35:52):
Yeah. Well, to be perfectly transparent about it, it is a factor in why I stopped writing. It had gained so much traction and I had become an exec now at Shopify and I was so busy at them. I was like, "I don't have the time to make this thing as good as it was. And I'm not even going to put another post out because I don't want to disappoint people." That's a real thing. I think you're probably better conditioned with this having written 300 posts now. I think you're a machine, but for me, it was like, I would put one every couple months maximum or something like that. And so when I lost the time, I had kids and all these types of things, it seemed insurmountable to prioritize.

**Lenny** (00:36:31):
I wanted to ask, what's your favorite thing that you've written? Which piece is your favorite?

**Brandon Chu** (00:36:36):
I don't know if I have a favorite, but the one that always I'd say has overall had the most traction or just constantly, even to today, people still tweet about or message me, whatever, was the one about making good decisions as a PM. Basically, the short of it is, the first thing it argues is that the most important thing to figure out when you're dealing with any decision is actually figuring out how important that decision is. Since we're faced with hundreds of decisions in any given moment around the product or whatever, and that we're only human and we can only prioritize a few, you got to figure out the importance of them so you can prioritize. And so it talks about things like either decision reversible or not. Does it affect a lot of users in a material way or not, stuff like that, ways to prioritize them basically.

**Brandon Chu** (00:37:22):
And then it kind of argues that okay, given the fact that we only have limited time and that the most important decisions are so much more important than the other 98, 99 of them, you should basically spend all your time on those very few important decisions. And for all other decisions, you should just literally just go with whatever your gut is or delegate it because you're only human and your gut is going to be right a decent amount of time too. And so just make those fast so that you can keep the team velocity high. You don't ever want to be a blocker, that's the other tension and then spend all your time on these few critical decisions.

**Lenny** (00:38:00):
Would you say that's still generally the way you work looking back at that post?

**Brandon Chu** (00:38:04):
Yeah. Definitely is still the way I work. I probably do it too much in terms of me doing my job here and there.

**Lenny** (00:38:09):
Awesome.

**Brandon Chu** (00:38:11):
It's like, "Oh, that isn't important." If you take overtime too, you get weathered down about what's actually super dire versus not. And once you've had a few battle scars of things that you thought were going to ruin everything, your career, your reputation, blah, blah, blah, and then actually nothing happened, you just start to raise the bar about what's actually important.

**Lenny** (00:38:31):
I love it. We're definitely going to link to that in the description for this episode. Is there a post that you wish you had written or want to write if you have the time?

**Brandon Chu** (00:38:39):
I've been wanting to write literally for three years. It'll probably be really long, but just a huge post about being a platform PM as opposed to product PM. And there's so many interesting differences in the ways that you have to think about prioritization. And I even told a story about it's a big cultural change too, that you have to affect people way beyond your team. Now you have to also work and you have to tell us to work multiparties. So you're building a, let's say a developer platform that they're building apps. Okay. Now there's multiple stakeholders. So the developers building these apps that are going to be consumed by these businesses, these merchants, and these apps also may be presented to end buyers. There's now three constituents and there's all these crazy things around policy, data sharing, just tension between which side gets economically rewarded for doing what. There's a lot of really interesting things.

**Brandon Chu** (00:39:33):
And so one day I hope to write something about that and that's even on just the pure strategy and kind of economic view of it. But then there's also a super fascinating product design and engineering problems of just like, okay, you have this web app or whatever, and you want apps to exist in it. Well, how are they going to exist in it? Right? Okay. Are you just going to let them put their link in there and then it opens up a new tab into that other product that's kind of lame? That's basically a Facebook comment of a link, or are you going to allow the actual third party product to exist inside of your product and how are you going to do that? Is it going to be an eye frame? Well, that's kind of janky.

**Brandon Chu** (00:40:11):
If it's going to be deeper, then now we're talking about direct data integration. We're talking about maybe your app serving UI on behalf of that app, but then some of the data comes from the third party server and it gets really, really interesting in terms of user experience and whatnot and it's actually quite common in our life that we don't think about it.

**Brandon Chu** (00:40:29):
So when you long press on an app on your iPhone and it has a shortcut list of things you could do quicker. Right? Okay. Say if you long press your email app, it'll probably say create new email as one of them. That's an extension. That's iOS saying, "Hey, Gmail app. I'm going to give you the ability to actually deep link this experience into your app through our operating system." Right? Someone actually had to design that idea, that user experience and we just take it for granted because that's how it works. Right? But there's so many crazy decisions there about, well, if you go too far, you give Google too much control there and they could do some really messed up stuff. Or if you don't go far enough, then it's really just lame. It's not actually powerful. And so it's a really interesting domain.

**Lenny** (00:41:18):
I'm glad you touched on this because this is exactly where I wanted to go next.

**Brandon Chu** (00:41:21):
Cool.

**Lenny** (00:41:22):
I want to chat about the PM career track, but maybe before we get into that, I know you haven't written this post, but for someone that's designing a platform or an ecosystem, is there any kind of just guiding frameworks or rules of thumb that you've come to to help you make some of these decisions that you talked about?

**Brandon Chu** (00:41:39):
I actually say the first thing is as a PM, your psychology has to really change around your own validation. So usually, you can build a product, ship it, customers tell you if it's good or not. The cycles for platform work are five to 10 odd times longer. You're maybe changing something on the infrastructure level, then opening up an API and then doing an alpha period for the API where developers now build on that and test things. And then you move into a beta. And then finally, two years later, some end customer actually uses that app, right, for this. And you're not designing actually the end user's experience. You're designing a canvas for developers to build their own creative ideas on. And it's just a very different type of work. And so I would say that's the first thing psychologically is be prepared for those much longer cycles.

**Brandon Chu** (00:42:29):
Surround yourself with people on your teams that find ways to enjoy that process and also find ways to celebrate rewards along the way like we would, not rewards, but celebrate shipping things along the way. When that API went into alpha, there's no press release, but how do you make the team feel amazing about that work? Right? You have to tell the big narrative about this is going to change how merchants actually get different apps in these areas or whatnot. And here's some of the crazy things that we're seeing in the early adoption, et cetera. So that's my main thing on psychology. I'd say in terms of preparing yourself, you really have to think about before you even get into the technical or design execution of any particular platform area, really think about the principles behind the platform that you're building. So an example, and then a contrast with Shopify's, in Amazon's platform, I'm making this up, but I assume that a pretty big important intro principle is that if there's ever a toss up between deciding between the seller and the buyer, the consumer, we're going to decide with the consumer. Right?

**Brandon Chu** (00:43:40):
That's why every time you refund something on Amazon, anytime you got a complaint, send you another one. Right? They made that trade off to be a consumer focused platform and obviously, that's been amazing for them, but you also hear the contrasting stories of sellers that are really pissed off Amazon that have ruined their businesses and whatnot. So not to hate on that, but that's a second order effect of that decision. In Shopify's case, we are here to support entrepreneurs and businesses in making their dreams come true and creating independence. And that is sometimes at the cost of developers on our platform. And so sometimes we may make a data policy change saying, "Hey. It's more important that the merchant has access to this data across apps. And it's important that actually you push that data back in Shopify so that you don't hold that data back so that this other app can't use it."

**Brandon Chu** (00:44:33):
And now we're sending the same end customer two marketing texts when they've already opted out of marketing texts or something like that. And so this is where you have to understand those principles and the stack rank of the constituents there to be able to make good policy and design choices. And I think it's something that if you're not conscious of early as a platform PM, you will blow up some stuff or there will be some bad instances that come up or you'll get blocked by the CEO or whatever on the day before it launches, which has happened to me.

**Lenny** (00:45:07):
Oh, no. This sounds like a very hard place to be in an organization, building a platform, building an ecosystem like this. You went into the platform world pretty early when you got to Shopify. And I know a lot of PMs think about, "Should I go platform? Should I go user facing product?" Do you have any advice for folks that are trying to decide which path to take? And is it even a one way door? Is it easy to go to a different direction later?

**Brandon Chu** (00:45:32):
That's a really tough question. I think if you have any particular interest in the types of problems that you solve, I'd give you a little snapshot of the things you think about as a platform PM. If that stuff gets you really interested, then follow that guy. I don't think it's either, or I don't think one is better than the other. I think they're completely different types of problem domains. I don't think it's also a one way door. I'd say even if you do primarily user facing or consumer facing side of the product, you're going to be consuming things on some platform somewhere, whether it's an internal API or a third party or whatnot. So you're going to experience platforms good and bad. Right? And so you'll learn about it. And then alternatively on the platform side, you're going to be designing the canvas and you're going to see what gets built there and you're going to learn what are good and bad bounds of not a single user experience, but a universe of user experiences that are possible.

**Brandon Chu** (00:46:26):
If you create a UI kit or something like that, you're going to see the good and the bad that comes out of that UI kit being given to the third party ecosystem and you'll learn about consumer. And so I also think oscillating between them is an amazing experience too, because there are really long cycles and platform work. And sometimes it's nice to ship and iterate and grow week over week and talk to your users about every single feature that you're shipping every other week. And that's so fun in different ways. And so I think having both is actually the right goal in both experiences.

**Lenny** (00:47:00):
To zoom out a little bit and as a final question, if you could suggest just one thing for PMs to do to help them level up in their career and just do better, what would that be?

**Brandon Chu** (00:47:13):
Everyone has so many different backgrounds, but I'd say overall, based on most PMs that I've met, I'd say, look, it is hard to do when you are a PM somewhere, but do a legitimate side hustle, found a company on the side and learn everything else. Because I think sometimes you're in this silo of your feature, your area or whatnot. And you forget what it means to sell something to a customer, what it means to support a product, what it means to ship something and get destroyed because it doesn't even work or something like that. And so I think it humbles you a bit. It reminds you of how hard it is to build software and how many people it takes to do that well. And especially if you're not in technical, really lean into it and build something simple, learn how to build something simple for yourself, demystify the technology.

**Brandon Chu** (00:48:03):
That experience will take you far. I love telling people that literally don't even know what HTML is or something like that, which I was one of those people that from right now over the weekend, you could build a clone of Twitter using a tutorial on Rails or something like that. You can do it. You may not know everything that's actually happening, right? But you could actually get that deployed and it'll work and it'll blow your mind that you did that. And I think once people break through that wall, when they're nontechnical, I think the momentum builds from there and so the side hustle and then also break technical walls or obscurity is what I would recommend.

**Lenny** (00:48:43):
Awesome. I love that advice. It's kind of like a microcosm of create your own little business and do all the things and break out of your little box that you're in. Maybe as a PM, where can folks find you online and how can listeners be useful to you?

**Brandon Chu** (00:48:55):
You can find me online, I guess, on Twitter @BrandonMChu and be useful to me. The simplest answer for me, I guess is I'm a pretty active angel investor. I've invested in 60 companies over the last five, six years. So if you're interested in an occasionally helpful angel investor, then hit me up. We may be a little bit too busy, but really the honest answer, I don't need anything. I think if anyone's listening and they want to help me out, just go help some stranger in the world that needs it. I'd rather you do that. I think I've been so lucky in life that I don't want anything.

**Lenny** (00:49:28):
Awesome. Thank you so much, Brandon.

**Brandon Chu** (00:49:29):
Thanks, Lenny. It's been a blast.

**Lenny** (00:49:33):
That was awesome. Thank you for listening. If you enjoy the chat, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You could also learn more at lennyspodcast.com. I'll see you in the next episode.

---

## [8/8] Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more

**Lenny** (00:00:02):
Teresa Torres is a speaker, a teacher, a consultant, a product coach, and also the author of Continuous Discovery Habits, which is the number one most recommended book in my newsletter Slack community.

I'm also pretty sure Teresa is in the top five people in the world when it comes to the number of product managers that she's worked with, taught, and impacted. In our chat, we get deep into two topics: the opportunity solution tree framework, which is a really simple but incredibly powerful framework once it, and, two, we go deep into how to create a system within your team where you're talking to customers regularly.

**Lenny** (00:00:34):
We talk about ways to make a case for spending more time talking to customers and doing news research, the most common mistakes people make with interviewing and generally how to interview customers better, how to automate this process so that you don't spend a bunch of time, and so many other ways to bring you and your organization closer to your customers. Teresa's amazing, and I can't wait for you to learn from her.

**Lenny** (00:00:55):
This episode is brought to you by Persona. Persona helps founders, product managers, and engineers easily solve any identity-related problem, including handling KYC, AML, and basically all manner of identity fraud. You can integrate Persona in an afternoon and personalize your flows using their SDK to meet your users on any device.

**Lenny** (00:01:16):
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**Lenny** (00:01:59):
So many product managers are basically treated like project managers. You get hired thinking that you'll be deep in product strategy and vision and getting to know your customers, only to wind up organizing other people's work and refining backlogs and optimizing tiny, tiny features. If this sounds familiar, you need Dovetail, because Dovetail gets that the true heart of product management is understanding what customers want, why they want it, and how to give it to them.

**Lenny** (00:02:25):
That's why Dovetail built a suite of user research products that help you get to the core of what your customers really want and why they want it. Dovetail offers a suite of powerful analysis tools to help you identify themes, patterns, and insights in your customer interviews, allowing you to make better data-informed decisions about what solutions you should build next.

**Lenny** (00:02:45):
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**Lenny** (00:03:11):
Teresa, thank you so much for being here. I don't know if this, but your book is consistently the number one most recommended book in my Slack community. Also, I've personally learned so much from you from your writing and just your tweets and all the ways that you share your lessons. And so, I'm really excited to delve into continuous discovery and all the things that you teach. And so, again, thank you for being here and welcome.

**Teresa Torres** (00:03:36):
Thanks, Lenny. I'm excited to be here.

**Lenny** (00:03:38):
How many PMs would you say that you've worked with through your consulting and through your courses? Just to give us a ballpark.

**Teresa Torres** (00:03:45):
That's a good question. I know through Product Talk Academy, we're just at about 11,000 students. I'm not very good at updating the number on our homepage. I think it still says something like 8,500. But officially I think we're just about to cross the 11,000 mark, which is a little bit mind-blowing to me and a ton of fun. Then on the coaching side, it's in the hundreds, not in the thousands, obviously because coaching is a little bit of a different beast. So, yeah, I'd probably say maybe 12,000.

**Lenny** (00:04:13):
That's incredible. Would you say that that maybe puts you in the top five PM teacher/influencer types that have worked with maybe the most PMs, just roughly? Just to give people a little context.

**Teresa Torres** (00:04:24):
I don't even know how to evaluate that. I still think about some of the really early people that had an influence on me and to see that some of them now recommend my book, it's just mind-boggling. It's pretty cool.

**Lenny** (00:04:37):
Yeah, I feel the same way sometimes with my newsletter. I'm like, oh, hey, this person that I always looked up to as a legend is now sharing my stuff. It's crazy.

**Teresa Torres** (00:04:44):
Yeah.

**Lenny** (00:04:44):
Before we get into the meat of the chat, just real quick, to plug your site and where to discover all the things that you do, what's the site people can check out while we chat?

**Teresa Torres** (00:04:52):
Yeah. So my site is producttalk.org. Then there's a few things like my blog at producttalk.org/blog. We put out two articles a month. Then we have a whole bunch of courses related to discovery at learn.producttalk.org.

**Lenny** (00:05:05):
Awesome. We'll chat a bit more about that at the end. So in our chat, I was hoping we'd cover two main topics, things that I've maybe learned most from you over the years. One is the opportunity solution tree framework. Then two is just the general idea of continuous discovery and all the ways to approach that. Does that sound good?

**Teresa Torres** (00:05:24):
Yeah, that sounds great.

**Lenny** (00:05:25):
Okay. So starting with the opportunity solution tree framework, it's such a simple but such a powerful way to visualize your strategy, your levers, how to prioritize, get buy-in from people, get everyone on the same page. It's probably the thing I share most of what you've put out with people. So I'd love to maybe start with just like what is this framework, what problem does it solve for people, and how can people apply it to their product problems?

**Teresa Torres** (00:05:51):
Yeah, really good question. So first of all, it's just a really simple visual. It's funny how simple it looks, because using it in practice is really complex. I definitely have a new appreciation for that, trying to teach it over and over again and seeing where people struggle.

**Teresa Torres** (00:06:06):
So it's a tree visual. So it's just like a decision tree. It starts with an outcome at the root of the tree, and then it branches into the opportunity space and then it branches into solutions, and maybe even assumption tests from there.

**Teresa Torres** (00:06:19):
The purpose of it is I recognize that while as an industry, some companies are moving from this output focus to an outcome focus, most product teams don't really know how to manage this really complex problem of how do I start from an outcome and figure out what to build? It's a really unstructured, wide open, hard problem.

**Teresa Torres** (00:06:41):
A lot of teams, they learn how to do their jobs building products by being told, "Build these features." That's a really structured, okay, I just turn out some work problem. And so, we're asking teams to fundamentally do a really different type of job and I think teams needed some scaffolding for how do you make that shift. And so, that was the purpose of the opportunity solution tree is how do I add some structure to this wide open, messy problem.

**Teresa Torres** (00:07:08):
Now the reason why it looks simple but it's really hard in practice is like, well, what's an opportunity and how do I structure the opportunity space? I can tell you that opportunity is an unmet need pain point or desire, and that's great. But I can tell you that 98% of people that write opportunities write them as solutions.

**Teresa Torres** (00:07:26):
So we tend to just really struggle with this distinction between the problem space and the solution space. I think that the heart of good product is really getting comfortable in the problem space or the opportunity space, really taking the time to frame a problem well, and to really get into what's needed before we jump to solutions.

**Teresa Torres** (00:07:48):
But it's the opposite of how our brains are wired. And so, teaching people to be comfortable with that discomfort of staying there is hard. I mean I see blog posts written about how they're using the opportunity solution tree, and I cry a little bit because their opportunity space is all solutions. I don't want to knock down somebody's blog post, but I also don't want this bad example out there in the world when I'm trying to teach how do we do this well. So I haven't found the right line there yet other than I'm going to blog about good examples.

**Lenny** (00:08:20):
Is there an example of a tree that, just to make it even more concrete, like for a company or product that you've worked with or that you think about?

**Teresa Torres** (00:08:26):
Yeah. So I like to use streaming entertainment as my examples, because literally everybody in the world is familiar with Netflix. If I think about their opportunity space, I recommend teams structure the opportunity space using an experience map, like if you take your outcome.

**Teresa Torres** (00:08:41):
So if we start with Netflix, if you think about the experience of you're trying to get me to engage with Netflix more, I want to understand what's the experience of somebody using streaming entertainment to entertain themselves. Maybe even broader than Netflix. If you watch YouTube TV, that's probably still relevant for me to learn about and understand.

**Teresa Torres** (00:09:02):
And so, the way that I'm going to structure my opportunity space is I'm going to look at what's the overall experience of trying to entertain yourself a streaming entertainment. That might look like, well, first there's this trigger of I need to decide to watch something. Then there's this experience of how am I deciding what to watch? Usually wrapped up in that is what platform am I watching it on? Those are sometimes inner mixed, because maybe you're deciding, "I want to watch Game of Thrones ," and that's right away sending you to HBO Max, or maybe you're like, "Well, I want to watch a movie," and I could be on any platform.

**Teresa Torres** (00:09:34):
Then there's the evaluation process of is this movie good or not? Does it look like something I want to watch? Then I want to get into, okay, I'm ready to watch. Is it a good viewing experience? Then for a lot of these platforms, there's also this post-viewing experience of like am I going to encourage you to keep watching, things like that?

**Teresa Torres** (00:09:52):
So that's how I would structure that opportunity space is just there's these distinct moments in time. Then what I'm capturing is, below each of those, what are the needs and pain points and desires that arise? So if we just focus on that one around how do I decide what to watch, there's all sorts of needs that come up. Some are really tactical, like I have a movie title in mind and I just don't know how to find it. That's a pain point. Or, hey, I was watching a show. How do I get back to it? It's also a pain point. But then there's also these big media opportunities, like I can't tell if this show is good or not.

**Teresa Torres** (00:10:27):
And so, everything that I just said, there was no solutions in there. In fact, whether I work at Netflix or I work at Hulu, our opportunity spaces probably look pretty similar. Now the ones we choose to go after and how we solve them might look really different. But the core human needs of what's your experience as we go about our lives entertaining ourselves is pretty similar.

**Teresa Torres** (00:10:51):
I think the companies that build really good products, they either intuitively or explicitly take the time to really understand what does that journey look like and what are those needs and pain points and how do we create a really seamless experience?

**Lenny** (00:11:04):
We're going to link to the blog post and a few examples in the show notes so people can look at this visually, because I know we're trying to describe it through words. A quick follow-up question. So you have this tree with the outcome, say, get people to watch more Netflix. I imagine you recommend, max, three to five levers below that. Is that right? Then the rest just sits somewhere else?

**Teresa Torres** (00:11:25):
Yeah, that's a really good question. So at the top level, I tend to map those opportunities to steps in that experience map. So in that Netflix example, it'd be the trigger of I want to watch something, deciding what to watch, the viewing experience. I do find that, oh, is it Miller's magic number? The plus or minus seven rule is pretty good. I would say nine is probably a lot. So I would say maybe in that three to seven range. That's just because you could cognitively process your tree.

**Teresa Torres** (00:11:57):
So the other thing that I get into is as you move vertically down the tree, your opportunities are getting smaller and smaller, which is really key to helping us unlock a continuous cadence. So if I start with that example of I can't decide what to watch, it's a really big hard evergreen problem. As long as Netflix is in business, they're probably going to have people focused on that problem.

**Teresa Torres** (00:12:16):
But we can deconstruct it. Maybe I can't find something to watch because I don't know if this show's any good. Then we can learn about how do people evaluate shows. Maybe there's a small opportunity in there of who's the cast? It's one of the ways I evaluate a show. Now we're getting into an opportunity that we can actually solve.

**Teresa Torres** (00:12:33):
So that's one of the other benefits. As we work our way down the tree, we get to smaller and smaller opportunities. We get to things that we can actually address. We're still contributing to that bigger, harder problem. And so, what it's allowing us to do is get this big picture view of where we could play, and then we can make more strategic decisions about where do we actually want to play. Then it's very customer-focused because it's really all about what's your need in this moment? How can I help satisfy that?

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**Lenny** (00:14:03):
For PMs and just maybe founders that are listening and they're like, "This sounds really useful. I want to create my own little opportunity solution tree," I know this a big question, but how do you go about figuring out what goes into each of these steps, however briefly, you can give people some guidance?

**Teresa Torres** (00:14:17):
Yeah. So the reason why this is so hard is that ... I mean it sounds really simple, but here's why it's hard. Opportunities emerge from our customers' stories. I don't think most people, when they're interviewing, they collect stories. So if, Lenny, I was going to interview you about your Netflix experience, the vast majority of product teams are saying things like, "Hey, Lenny, what do you like to watch on Netflix? How do you decide what to watch?" We're asking these direct questions out of context.

**Teresa Torres** (00:14:43):
The challenge with that is we know from human psychology and cognitive psychology that we're not very good at answering those questions out of context. Actually, that sounds weird. We're very good at answering them. Your brain will come up with a fast answer, but that answer doesn't necessarily reflect your behavior, and it misses context and nuance.

**Teresa Torres** (00:15:01):
You can tell me, "I just like action movies. I always look for action movies." I can't visualize your experience. I don't know what your experience is watching action movies. I just collected a fact about you. But if I ask you, like, "Tell me about the last time you watched a movie," now I can collect things like where were you and who were you with and set the scene for me, and what happened first and how did you choose that? I'm going to get answers to all those direct questions, but it's grounded in this specific instance. It's going to be a lot more reliable. And I'm going to start to hear unmet needs, pain points, and desires.

**Teresa Torres** (00:15:36):
The really powerful thing is I might hear needs that you're not even aware of. We're so used to everything being mediocre, we're not even aware of a lot of these needs that we have. But when we tell our stories, especially if you start to train your ear for this, you start to hear those needs.

**Teresa Torres** (00:15:54):
So the first thing that makes this hard is you have to interview well. I think interviewing is a grossly underestimated skill. Grossly underestimated skill. So that's the first thing is that if you're not collecting rich stories in your interviews, it's going to be really hard to identify opportunities.

**Teresa Torres** (00:16:12):
Then the second thing is that you have to be able to hear those opportunities. If you're still stuck with what's an opportunity versus what's a solution, it's tough. Then the third thing is this opportunity framing. I believe opportunity should be really specific.

**Teresa Torres** (00:16:27):
A really great opportunity in the streaming space is it's hard to enter my password, select specific letters on the screen with the Apple TV remote. If anybody has had an Apple TV, especially the old remote, it's not a very precision device. Selecting those letters on the stupid onscreen keyboard is a horrible pain point. It comes up when we're entering our passwords, it comes up when we're searching for movie titles. That's a really specific opportunity.

**Teresa Torres** (00:16:53):
The value of that is we can solve it. Whereas teams tend to want to frame opportunities as like, "I wish this was easier to use." Okay, well, we can spend our lives making this product easier to use. What are you solving for who? And so, we're skill stacking. Then we've got to interview well. We've got to be able to hear opportunities. We've got to be able to frame them well. Then in order to structure the opportunity space, we have to be able to come pull out this common experience map, structure across seemingly unique stories.

**Teresa Torres** (00:17:21):
So there's a lot of skill involved. I wish I could just say, "Hey, Lenny. It's super easy. Everybody should do it. I think it's really powerful, and I've seen it be a game-changer for teams. It's hard.

**Teresa Torres** (00:17:32):
I tell my teams when I teach it in class, I say, "Look, we're going to focus on structuring an opportunity space, and I'm probably going to make you think harder than you've ever had to think in your job," because we don't think that much at work. We go from meeting to meeting, we stay surface level a lot, and here I am coming in with this really hard critical thinking exercise.

**Teresa Torres** (00:17:53):
But I've just seen from teams that are willing to put in that work, it really is a game-changer. You have a deeper understanding of what your customers need and you build better products.

**Lenny** (00:18:02):
Man, thinking deeply.

**Teresa Torres** (00:18:03):
Yeah.

**Lenny** (00:18:03):
No fun, but it's so important. I want to chat about interviewing and all the advice you have about just how to interview. But before we get to that, one last question around the opportunity solution work. So the whole idea is to think outcome-oriented. To your point, a lot of companies have product teams that are just like, "Build these things for us. Don't worry about why we're doing these."

**Lenny** (00:18:24):
If your company is of that ladder sort, more of a feature factory, can you use this framework to push the team and the company in a direction of thinking outcome-oriented, or is there a more direct approach to address that problem?

**Teresa Torres** (00:18:37):
Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about this based on the role. If you're an individual contributor and you're not at a 10-person company, I would say don't try to force the organizational change. Organizational change is such a hard and messy problem. I feel like what I would do in that situation is I would just change the way that I individually worked.

**Teresa Torres** (00:18:56):
This is what I always did in every job. I mean I made a lot of mistakes trying to change the organization, but I also just carved out a way for me to work this way. I think we underestimate how much ability we have to do that. So even if you're being prescribed a fixed roadmap, you still can find customers to talk to.

**Teresa Torres** (00:19:14):
I hear from people all the time say, "I'm not allowed to talk to customers." I go, "Okay, well, your company doesn't own you when you're not at work. I bet you know people like your customers. Why don't you just start there?"

**Teresa Torres** (00:19:24):
So we overthink it. We think we have to go through these proper channels and we have to get permission from sales. A lot of us, especially if we work on a consumer product, just go find somebody that's like your user. But I've also seen instances in B2B environments, where like I worked with that team that worked on badges for healthcare, the badges that nurses and doctors use to unlock a workstation that they chart in. This team, for weeks, ran into problems finding a customer to talk to.

**Teresa Torres** (00:19:52):
I just said, "Hey, do any of you know doctors or nurses in your personal network?" The product manager was like, "Yeah, I have two uncles that are doctors." "Huh. Maybe we could just start there." Go talk to somebody.

**Teresa Torres** (00:20:05):
I think that even if you aren't being tasked with an outcome, if you do the work to understand these are the outcomes that matter to your business for your product, it's probably going to start with your business model, and then work to understand how the work that you're doing contributes to that. All those little teeny tiny decisions we make every day, even if you're being prescribed solutions, you'll make better decisions, because you have a fuller context of what your business needs. You have a fuller context of what your customer needs.

**Teresa Torres** (00:20:36):
So I think for most of us, if you're in an individual contributor role, just focus on developing the habits yourself. I'm always amazed, I was always amazed at how much I could do by just ignoring everybody around me and how they were working and finding a way to do it.

**Lenny** (00:20:51):
I love that because it lets you empower yourself and not wait for permission for excuses. This is always such a recipe for success for any role, especially PMs that are annoyed by how maybe their company works.

**Lenny** (00:21:02):
This is a really good segue to our second topic around continuous discovery. We've been touching on a lot of the elements of it, interviewing and understanding pain points and all that. And so, maybe just to set a little bit of foundation, what is continuous discovery? Your book is named after it. You, of course, is on this, which the general idea of continuous discovery.

**Teresa Torres** (00:21:22):
Yeah, let's just start at the beginning. So we often talk about discovery and contrast with delivery. Discovery is just used to describe the work we're doing to decide what to build. So everybody, every company is doing discovery. Everybody is making decisions about what to build.

**Teresa Torres** (00:21:37):
We have a few trends that have been evolving very slowly over the last 20 years. One of which is we're recognizing that if we want to make good decisions about what to build, we probably should include the customer somewhere in that process.

**Teresa Torres** (00:21:49):
So I teach a customer-centric view of discovery. Let's build in some feedback loops of are we making the right decisions, or are we making good decisions? Because there probably aren't right decisions here.

**Teresa Torres** (00:22:00):
So then there's a second trend that we're seeing across the board, which is we're recognizing that digital products are never done. It's not like the Netflix team is going to show up to work one day and be like, "Hey, our product's good enough." We're always iterating, we're always improving. Customer needs are always evolving. There's always more we could do.

**Teresa Torres** (00:22:18):
And so, we're seeing a shift from this project mindset that worked in a world where we were just trying to get products on a store shelf. We designed them, we built them, we manufactured them, we put them on the store shelf, we were done. We moved on to the next thing.

**Teresa Torres** (00:22:32):
But with digital products, there's no done. So we're seeing this shift to more of a continuous mindset. We're continuously evolving our products, which means we're continuously making decisions about what to build and, therefore, I think we need to continuously include the customer in that process. So for me, I define continuous discovery as building in those continuous feedback loops.

**Lenny** (00:22:55):
Awesome. That's such a simple, clear way of thinking about this because, yeah, broadly it's like a new term people have to get used to. I think you saw I made a call on Twitter for people to ask me to ask you questions about continuous discovery. And so, I'm going to try to get as many of those in there in this chat as I can. One actually was around what do you do when your leaders tell you there's no time for discovery?

**Teresa Torres** (00:23:18):
Yeah, this is a tough one. I think this comes from old project-based research methods. So we don't most of the time have time to stop what we're doing and go do some research. I'm not pooh-poohing research. I mean I've worked as a user researcher. Research is critical. If we had the luxury of doing long longitudinal studies, we would probably build better products.

**Teresa Torres** (00:23:40):
That's not our business environment. Our businesses are expecting us to deliver continuous value, so we need to look at how do we match that cadence. What I think is really nice about continuous discovery, you can do it in as little as an interview a week, on the interviewing side, on the discovering opportunity side.

**Teresa Torres** (00:23:58):
Assumption testing. People always ask me, "How much time should I be spending on an assumption testing?" I don't know how to answer that question because for me, assumption testing and delivery are the same work. Assumption testing is the start of your delivery. I don't know where one starts and one ends, which is a little bit hard to conceptually work through, but maybe we can talk through an example.

**Teresa Torres** (00:24:20):
So when somebody says, "I don't have time for discovery," I think what they're really saying is, "I don't have time for project-based research," and I agree with that. We don't have time for project-based research. So if I'm getting that pushback, I want to look for, okay, I definitely don't ...

**Teresa Torres** (00:24:33):
Like people make this mistake of we shouldn't put something in our backlog that hasn't been properly discovered. It's not true. Everything in our backlog is a bet, everything. Whether we do discovery or not, everything is a bet. Discovery is helping us make a better bet.

**Teresa Torres** (00:24:52):
Now sometimes in our organizations, we need to do a lot of discovery and make as good of a bet as we can. But there's other times we can make a risky bet. There's times in business where it makes sense to make a risky bet. If you work somewhere where all of your bets have been risky because you're doing zero discovery, the best way to kill any appetite for discovery is to say, "Let's stop making bets until we discover." No, don't do that. Keep making bets. In parallel, start doing some discovery so that eventually those bets get better.

**Teresa Torres** (00:25:29):
I think the reason why people make this mistake is they think about it as phases. First I discover and then I deliver. No, you're always delivering and you're always discovering. The more you build this discovery habit, the better those bets are going to get with time.

**Teresa Torres** (00:25:44):
So it's not that you do one first and then the other. It's you're always doing both. The benefit of always doing both is with time you make better bets.

**Lenny** (00:25:51):
You said that you could do this with one meeting like an hour a week. I know you have a system that you recommend for people to make this automated so you're not just constantly pinging your customers, "Hey, can I chat with you this week?" Can you just share that?

**Teresa Torres** (00:26:04):
Yeah. So my book, Continuous Discovery Habits, I do share some of the most common ways to automate the recruiting process. So this idea came from ... I had just read Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, when it came out a few years ago. They had this idea of when you're designing a choice architecture, how do you make it easier to adopt the behavior you want to see than to not adopt the behavior?

**Teresa Torres** (00:26:26):
So I started thinking about this in the context of interviewing. I want to see product teams interview every week. So how do I make it easier for them to do that than to not do that?

**Teresa Torres** (00:26:35):
Okay, well a lot of us have recurring meetings that we go to every week because they're on our calendar. So I just started to think about how do I make an interview a recurring meeting? Can I make it so that when you wake up on Monday morning, there's an interview on your calendar and you literally did nothing to get it there?

**Teresa Torres** (00:26:50):
And so, there's a few ways to think about this. The most common strategy is to allow your customers to opt in while they're using your product or service. So just almost everybody's seen an NPS survey embedded in a product. That's pretty prevalent now. Same idea, but instead of saying, "Would you recommend our product or service to a friend or colleague?" it says, "Do you have 20 minutes to talk to us?" If they say yes, you send them some scheduling software, they pick a time on your calendar, and voila. You've got an interview scheduled.

**Teresa Torres** (00:27:18):
You obviously can get more advanced. Where do you show it? Who do you show it to? How much do you tailor it? How do you position it? But the core idea is to let people opt in while you already have their attention. That works really well for consumers and B2B end users.

**Teresa Torres** (00:27:34):
If you're trying to get in touch with buyers and decision-makers, same idea but use your internal teams that are already on the phone with those folks. So that salespeople, account managers, maybe support folks, they're literally on the phone with those people all day every day. So instead of using your product to recruit, you can use those teams to recruit.

**Teresa Torres** (00:27:54):
What I do is I just have teams define a trigger every week, like, "Hey, this week we're looking to talk to somebody who's experiencing this need or pain point. If you happen to be on the phone with someone who's experiencing that, again, just go ahead and use scheduling software, put it on our calendar." The goal is for the product team to not be involved at all. They literally just have to show up and connect the interview.

**Lenny** (00:28:15):
That's amazing. Are there tools that you recommend that are just plug and play that make this easy? I know Calendly is probably a part of this.

**Teresa Torres** (00:28:21):
There are so many. So even on the scheduling side, I think Calendly innovated in that space, but there's so many fast followers. I think Outlook does this now. I think Google has a tool that does this now. I think even Salesforce has a tool that does this now. So if you're sales team is scheduling through Salesforce. Then on the intercept side, like how are you asking those? We have survey tools.

**Teresa Torres** (00:28:45):
Qualaroo, I think, innovated in this space. Then I think Ethnio is a fast follower. But Intercom does this, Usabilla does this, Chameleon does this. Hotjar might even do this. We have so many user research tools that they're all now enabling this type of thing.

**Lenny** (00:29:03):
Awesome. For when you're actually doing the interviewing, we had a couple of questions from some Teresa fans. One is when you know what the solution should be, how do you stay disciplined and keep an open mind and keep searching for maybe something even better?

**Teresa Torres** (00:29:17):
Yeah. First of all, you don't always have to do that. Not all solutions need a lot of discovery. That's a common misunderstanding, I think. I think we need to do really robust, good discovery on the things that are part of our core product experience or going to be differentiators. We don't really have to do really amazing core discovery on the forgot password flow if it's working fine and you're not hearing about it as a pain point.

**Teresa Torres** (00:29:42):
Now to be fair, Slack with their magic link, did a cool thing with the forgot password flow. That was a nice innovative thing that I think moved the industry forward. So if you want to do discovery on that, great, but you probably don't have to. So I think the first thing to assess is we're making a bet. How much risk is involved in this bet and how much of that risk do we need to mitigate?

**Teresa Torres** (00:30:06):
Now most companies think there's no risk in any bets and they do zero discovery. If you're not instrumenting your product and actually measuring the impact of those solutions, you may not be catching that there actually was a lot of risk. So I think you do need to instrument your product. You do need to measure the impact of everything that you release so you can start honing your judgment on where is there risk in ideas.

**Teresa Torres** (00:30:29):
When you're new to discovery, I recommend you overindex on doing a little too much discovery so that you start honing your judgment of that risk. But if you're working on an opportunity that's really core to your product functionality, it is a differentiator, it's where you want to make sure you have a really robust, good solution, I think the best way to guard against what you think is the obvious solution is to work with multiple solutions for the same opportunity.

**Teresa Torres** (00:30:53):
Compare and contrast. We already know this intuitively. When you're looking for a place to live, you don't look at one apartment or house. You look at multiple, you compare and contrast. When you're looking for a job, you don't talk to one company. We know if we want to make good decisions, we need options and we need to evaluate the pros and cons of each. The same is true in the product world.

**Teresa Torres** (00:31:13):
So if you're feeling like this needs to be a really good solution and we're having some challenges, we're overcommitting to one, that's when you need to increase your options.

**Lenny** (00:31:23):
I'd love your insight on, as a PM, how much ... In theory, you should be a little bit unbiased and giving people a chance to change your mind and come up with ideas that maybe you disagree with. On the other hand, as a PM, you always have opinions about what the right answer is. Just like in the PM function, do you have a perspective on how much more, say, a PM should have maybe over what ends up being decided?

**Teresa Torres** (00:31:47):
Yeah, this is a tough question. I mean there's such strong opinions about this. I mean I see analogies of the product manager is the decider and they're the CEO of the product. I think this is coming from toxic business culture personally. Business has taught us we all play a role. We have our functional silos. I have territory, you have territory, and we're going to play the internal office politics game. I need to defend my territory and you need to defend your territory.

**Teresa Torres** (00:32:13):
The outcome is that we don't really collaborate. When we don't collaborate, I don't think we build very good products. So if we just go back to real life and when you're hanging out with friends and you're trying to accomplish something, the example I gave is when you're a little kid and you're playing, you don't like to first stop and say, "What's my role? What's your role?" I guess it's just not how humans interact. We all collaborate and we all do it intuitively. Business has taught us otherwise.

**Teresa Torres** (00:32:40):
I'm going to forget the researcher, but there's a really cool ... The marshmallow test experiment. Are you familiar with this? Where teams are given spaghetti sticks and some tape and some string and a marshmallow. They're told to build a structure to get the marshmallow as high as possible.

**Teresa Torres** (00:32:56):
A study's been done so many times. It's been replicated a million times with lots of different groups. It's a really cool story because kindergartners outperform almost every adult group, including MBA students. It's really telling. Why is this?

**Teresa Torres** (00:33:10):
Kindergartners just start doing. They don't worry about their rules. They don't worry about who's in charge. They just brute force trial and error. What do MBA students do? There's posturing, like who has power and who's the decision-maker and who's right? We need a plan and we need to have a strategy. They spend the whole time negotiating this political social space instead of just doing. I really think we've got to learn how to get back to just doing.

**Teresa Torres** (00:33:37):
And so, people think that I'm like Pollyanna naive about this, but I've worked on teams that work this way and I've coached teams that work this way where the trio really does decide. So the trio is the product manager, the designer, and the software engineer. If you've never worked in a well-functioning trio, this breaks people's brains, because they say, "Well, what are we going to do when we disagree?" You're going to find an option where you don't disagree.

**Teresa Torres** (00:34:00):
The thing is if you only worked on a siloed dysfunctional team, that sounds like a nightmare. But if you've worked on a well-functioning team that's doing discovery well together, you're working from a shared understanding. So your disagreements right away are going to go way down because you're working from a shared understanding, and when you disagree, you recognize, okay, we don't agree, we don't have the best option yet. You keep looking for that better option.

**Teresa Torres** (00:34:26):
What's hard about talking about this is I fully understand probably 98% of the industry has never worked on a well-functioning product trio, and this idea sounds crazy. But I've also seen it in practice over and over again on really good teams, and there's something magical about it. So I'm going to keep promoting it and I'm going to hope that eventually we get from 2% to 3%. That'll be my little debt I put in the universe.

**Lenny** (00:34:49):
Yeah. I was just going to say that you're helping make that change and I'm excited for that to be the way that people operate. And so, maybe one takeaway is if that's something that you're spending a lot of time on and it's causing you a lot of stress, it probably means you're working at a company or on a team that maybe isn't optimal.

**Teresa Torres** (00:35:05):
I don't mean that to say there's something wrong with you or your teammates. This is a symptom of business culture. It's how we've been taught to work. So we have to unlearn that. We have to learn new ways of working. We do this in our courses. We force people to work in teams in our courses, and some people really hate it. But I think learning to work well in a team, especially when there's different perspectives and you disagree and how do you reconcile that, is a really important part of product work.

**Lenny** (00:35:32):
Awesome. Going back to discovery and interviewing, I definitely wanted to ask you what are, I don't know, two or three tips and best practices for interviewing/what are two or three things people usually do wrong that they should try to avoid?

**Teresa Torres** (00:35:47):
Yeah. The first one is the questions they're asking. So many people write these who why, how, 50-question long interview protocols. It leads to a cadence of the interview that is not a natural conversation. So I think the first thing to remember is that you're just talking to a human.

**Teresa Torres** (00:36:06):
I actually tell people if your interview feels like you're having a beer with a buddy, that's a good sign. It should be that casual and that conversational. But we're not going to get there if I pepper you with 50 questions. We're going to get there by I'm going to collect your story. I'm going to be really curious. I might still have to pepper you with 50 questions to get your story, because there's this conversational norm of I say something, you say something. So I've got to teach you that I want your whole story and help you open up.

**Teresa Torres** (00:36:36):
So that's one piece of it. It's just the cadence of the conversation really should feel like a natural conversation. Then the second piece of it is how do we do that? What's the skill? How do we elicit that story?

**Teresa Torres** (00:36:46):
I teach in our interviewing class, you really don't have to think about what to ask. You could run an entire interview by asking them one question. In fact, let's role play this a little bit. Lenny, tell me about the last time you watched something on a streaming entertainment service.

**Lenny** (00:37:00):
Just last night I was watching Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney+.

**Teresa Torres** (00:37:04):
Okay. Yeah. Great. Okay, so it was last night. Set the scene for me. Where were you?

**Lenny** (00:37:09):
I was at home on my couch, just lounging.

**Teresa Torres** (00:37:11):
Okay. Tell me about the moment where you decided you wanted to watch something.

**Lenny** (00:37:15):
It was 8:00 and I'm like, "It's time to watch something."

**Teresa Torres** (00:37:18):
Okay. Is that part of your normal routine?

**Lenny** (00:37:21):
Yeah, in the evenings. It's a good way to unwind and let my brain relax a little bit. Okay,

**Teresa Torres** (00:37:25):
Okay. So you're sitting on the couch, you decided it's time to watch something. What did you do next?

**Lenny** (00:37:30):
Turned on the TV, went to Netflix, didn't find anything. Went to Prime, didn't find anything. I'm like, "Oh yeah, Obi-Wan. Let's check that out."

**Teresa Torres** (00:37:39):
Okay. So I literally could continue this entire interview by just saying, "Oh, you opened Netflix. What happened next? Oh, you didn't find anything. How come?" All I have to do is just be curious about your experience. What I'm doing with my questions is just helping you tell the timeline.

**Teresa Torres** (00:37:59):
Set the scene. I'm situating you back in that moment. Let's remember what you actually did. It was after dinner. You were sitting on the couch. What happened next? I can do that over and over again.

**Teresa Torres** (00:38:09):
And so, one of the reasons why we get bad at interviewing, we're so worried about asking the next question, we stop listening to the interviewee. We just missed everything we were told. We missed those moments of like, "Oh, there is some friction. You couldn't find something to watch. Tell me about that. What did you consider on Netflix? Let's dig into that."

**Teresa Torres** (00:38:27):
If I work on a team that's trying to help you find something to watch, that's a gold mine. You just told me you went on Netflix, you went on Prime. What were you looking at and what didn't resonate? Is it because you'd watched everything? Is it because it just didn't match your profile? There's so much to explore there.

**Teresa Torres** (00:38:44):
But what I see most teams do is they stay really shallow. "Oh, okay. So you watched Obi-Wan on Prime. Great. Tell me another story." We just lost all the value.

**Teresa Torres** (00:38:57):
And so, some of it is just slowing down and almost being a five-year-old. You really, instead of saying, "Why? Why? Why?" you can say, "What happened next? What happened next?"

**Teresa Torres** (00:39:08):
Now there's this technique of summarize what you heard, show that you're listening to them, bring them back to the moment where you want a little more detail. But, yeah, it's a game-changer. What happens when you collect stories is you hear about things you would've never thought to ask about.

**Lenny** (00:39:23):
It's also really fun to share because I'm like, "Oh, this is fun," just talking about what I do.

**Teresa Torres** (00:39:27):
I love that you just said that, because people worry. How many times have you heard somebody say, like ... You asked the sales rep, "Hey, can I talk to your customer?" and they're like, "I don't want to ask them a favor." It turns out if you collect stories in your interviews, customers love it. Most of the time, in fact the sign that you ran a good interview, is your customer is going to say, "Wow. When can we do this again?"

**Lenny** (00:39:49):
Wow. I love that. The other piece of this that you haven't mentioned is there's a lot of focus on what you've done, not on what you would do or you could do. I imagine that's an important part of this.

**Teresa Torres** (00:39:57):
Product people are in the business of changing behavior, understanding and changing behavior. I think that's a really big mistake that teams make is, both in their prototype tests and in their interviews, they focus on what people would do, on what people think, on why they think they do something. It's all really unreliable. It's a garbage in, garbage out situation. The real measure is tell me about your behavior. What did you actually do? We have to help people do that.

**Lenny** (00:40:25):
Something else someone asked that I really wanted to cover is how does this process change as your company grows from early stage to later stage?

**Teresa Torres** (00:40:33):
Yeah. In an ideal world, it doesn't change because here's why. If I have a trio and they have an outcome and they're empowered to reach that outcome, and they're interviewing every week and their assumption testing to evaluate solutions, and they're finding things to build and they're driving their outcome, that's a really successful team. They could do that in a three-person company or they could do that in a hundred thousand-person company.

**Teresa Torres** (00:40:58):
The primary difference is in a three-person company, there's no adjacent teams. In a hundred thousand-person company, there's a lot of adjacent teams. And so, you probably have some dependencies to manage. But you still should start with an outcome, be empowered to go after it, be empowered to come up with your own solutions.

**Teresa Torres** (00:41:17):
What's going to be different in that a hundred thousand-person company is you probably have design patterns and libraries you got to rely on for a coherent user experience. You probably have another team that's working adjacent to you that you need to share your discovery work and be aware of what they're working on, because you do need to build a coherent product.

**Teresa Torres** (00:41:34):
And so, as our companies get bigger, we have a lot of that lateral collaboration we have to do to make sure we're still building a coherent product. But I think the fundamental base unit stays the same.

**Lenny** (00:41:47):
Something that I've seen happen with larger companies, especially as companies grow, is a little bit of cynicism of user research, specifically how few people you talk to and how that leads to you making a decision. How do you respond to those kinds of concerns?

**Teresa Torres** (00:42:02):
I love this. I don't know why product teams suddenly are held to a standard that nobody else is held to. When somebody says something like, "Why is it reliable to make a decision based on one interview?" I just flip the question around. Tell me about the decisions you made last week. How many customers did you talk to? What data did you use?

**Teresa Torres** (00:42:20):
Every human in business is making decisions with zero data. So I'm going to go with one is better than zero. That's a little bit of a flippant answer, but it's true.

**Teresa Torres** (00:42:32):
Here's what's happening when that question comes up. I have an opinion that's different than yours. I don't like your conclusion so I'm going to nitpick it. In the product world, unfortunately, everybody in business has an opinion about what we should be building. And so, that's how we face that and we get held to this standard.

**Teresa Torres** (00:42:52):
I have a real reason why we can make decisions based on small data. We're in the business of changing behavior, not seeking new knowledge. We have really good feedback loops. And so, we can make decisions based on small experiments because we're going to continue to get bigger feedback loops and more reliable data over time. Especially as we deliver and we do live production prototyping, we actually can get large-scale data. I don't want to start there because we're never going to ship anything.

**Teresa Torres** (00:43:17):
So there is legitimately a valid reason why we can work on small data, but it's an unfair question, because we're not holding anybody else in business to that standard.

**Lenny** (00:43:26):
Along those lines, when does it make sense to run an experiment versus rely on user research? Do you have a mental model for how you think about that?

**Teresa Torres** (00:43:34):
Our language around this is terrible. It's so ambiguous. What's an experiment? What's user research? I would say experiments are user research. I'm trying to just dramatically simplify this.

I think from a discovery standpoint, we have two core activities: qualitative interviewing and assumption testing. And so, with qualitative interviewing, we're trying to learn about the opportunity space. Where do we see unmet needs, pain points, and desires? Interviewing is not the only way to identify opportunities. Observations are actually a better way. I focus on interviewing because it's something we can do sustainably week over week. Most teams don't have the ability to observe their customers every week.

**Teresa Torres** (00:44:11):
On the assumption testing side, for me, anything that helps us evaluate a solution where we're starting with a very specific assumption is an assumption test. So we have experiments that I actually don't even think we should be running, because they're testing the whole idea before we have any idea if that idea has a strong foundation. They're taking too long. They cost too much money. They're taking too much time. So how do I break this down?

**Teresa Torres** (00:44:37):
The first thing is we have to learn how to take an idea and break it into its underlying assumptions. We have to learn how to prioritize those assumptions. Then we have to learn how to run tests that are small enough that they're just testing that assumption.

**Teresa Torres** (00:44:51):
This is all critical because it's what makes continuous discovery sustainable. I tell people to work with three ideas at once, and teams are struggling to test even a single idea. So how's that sustainable? Well, that team that's struggling to test a single idea is still stuck in project-based research world. They're running experiments that take weeks to get results.

**Teresa Torres** (00:45:13):
Whereas when I talk about assumption testing, I'm working with a team that's running half a dozen to a dozen assumption tests in one week, and those assumptions span three ideas. At the end of the week, they can start to compare and contrast those solutions. So we've got to shift our methods. Continuous discovery is sustainable if we change our behavior, if we change our habits.

**Lenny** (00:45:36):
For folks that want to learn more about assumption testing, continuous discovery, all the things that you've been chatting about, where can they find you online and find these courses online?

**Teresa Torres** (00:45:44):
Yeah. So first I'll mention the book, Continuous Discovery Habits. It's available at bookstores around the world. It's in EPUB, paperback, and Audible. Then I do blog about all of this at producttalk.org and our courses are at learn.producttalk.org.

**Lenny** (00:45:57):
Awesome. I also love to ask guests, how can listeners be useful to you?

**Teresa Torres** (00:46:01):
Since the book has come out, the reaction has been unbelievably amazing and a lot of fun. And I'm a little bit overwhelmed by people in the industry who have never been exposed to this way of working having a lot of skepticism that it's possible.

**Teresa Torres** (00:46:17):
So here's how listeners can be helpful. I didn't make up this way of working. This way of working evolved from teams figuring this out. I see it as I'm looking at how do I collect sustainable practices, making it as easy as possible for other teams to work this way?

**Teresa Torres** (00:46:34):
So I think the way listeners can help me is if you've never been exposed to this and you have healthy skepticism, that's awesome. And just ask yourself, imagine if this worked, imagine if this was possible, because I get really tired having to explain to people there really are teams that work this way. I'm sorry that you've never been exposed to it, but there really are teams that have worked this way. If you've never been exposed to that, go look for it. There's lots of evidence of it on the internet.

**Lenny** (00:47:03):
Amazing. I'm hoping our chat helps fight the fight for that changing of minds. Teresa, thank you so much for being here. I had a blast. I learned a lot. Thank you.

**Teresa Torres** (00:47:11):
Lenny, thanks so much for having me. This has been fun.

**Lenny** (00:47:15):
That was awesome. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the chat, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You could also learn more at lennyspodcast.com. I'll see you in the next episode.

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