Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:04:01 · Jessica Fain, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:04:01] S0: Thanks for having me. [00:04:02] S1: It's my pleasure. Let's set this conversation up. We're going to be talking about the skill and the art of influence, and in particular, influencing executives and leaders. People above you that you want to convince to do things you want them to do. Help us understand why this is worth people's time. Why is this worth the next hour of someone listening to this? Why is this skill so important to people's careers? [00:04:26] S0: I think as product builders, there's almost not a skill that's more important. Influence and building momentum behind great ideas is the way that great products actually get built. And if you don't have that influence, if you don't have the buy-in and the backing of your key stakeholders, of your executives, you can't build great products. [00:04:49] S1: Something that I personally went through is just like... I was in a period of like, I don't need to work on this skill. I'm just like, I'm just going to do amazing work. It's going to show itself, of everyone's going to recognize it. And everyone run into this wall of like, oh man, all these other people are getting promoted. Maybe talk about that because it feels like that's a big trap. People run into you.
00:05:09 · Jessica Fain, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:05:09] S0: I think why I wanted to talk to you about this is, when I was an ICPM, I was putting forth ideas. I was trying to reflect what I was hearing from my customers. I was trying to get sort of buy-in and excitement about the work that I thought was really going to move us forward. And at the time that I'm thinking about, I was a PM at Slack, and some of my ideas got people really excited, got me funding and backing, and just really a sense that we could accomplish something great. And some of my ideas and the things that I really, really believed in died on the vine. They went nowhere. And I was so confused and frustrated, honestly. Because I felt like, "Hey, I really get this user base. I really understand what's going to move the ball forward and I don't understand how these decisions are actually being made behind the scenes." And I was eight months pregnant, eight and a half months pregnant, April Underwood, who had just been named CPO of Slack. She had just come back from maternity leave. We had a two-day overlap and I sort of got up my courage and I said to her, "April, I've admired you for a long time. I love the way you work. I really love the way you think. And I really want to understand it better. If you'd ever consider having a chief of staff, I'd love for you to consider me." And when I came back from that maternity leave, I came into a stint as April's chief of staff and was later chief of staff to Tamar Yehoshua who succeeded April. [00:06:38] S1: Who has been on the podcast.
00:06:38 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jessica Fain
[00:06:38] S1: Who has been on the podcast. [00:06:39] S0: Who's been on the podcast, and is now a CPO and head of AI at Atlassian. Tamar, don't be mad if I mess up your title. And what I learned through that process is that people completely misunderstand how executives make decisions, what is going on in the heads, in the calendars, in the incentive structures of executives. And, instead of really understanding where that exec or stakeholder is coming from, they center themselves, they center their own desires, their own motivations, their own slice of the world. And they end up just not being as successful both in their career, but also in the types of products that they're building. [00:07:21] S1: What's an example of that when you talk about, people don't understand how product leaders actually make decisions, how they decide what to do, what to listen to, what's an example?
00:07:29 · Jessica Fain
[00:07:29] S0: Oh my gosh. I think the biggest example of this is people don't understand executive calendars. A lot of times on Google Calendar, it's blocked. You can't see what they're working on, but I describe an executive's calendar as like a strobe light going off. You wake up at 8:00 AM, you've already got a huge list of urgent things going on. You go from a meeting with finance on a budget, to an interview for another executive, to a people problem, to a legal problem, to a product review. And the product manager coming to that product review, or the leader who's trying to make a pitch, thinks, "I've been prepping for this meeting for two weeks, three weeks, maybe six weeks since we last spoke," but the executive coming into that session hasn't thought about you since. They may not have gone to the bathroom today, right? And you have to understand that they have not had the time, the energy, the wherewithal to center your problems and you have to help them get into that mindset. So this is as simple as, execs are people too, right? They are running around context switching in the most insane ways I've ever seen, and everything that comes across their plate is an emergency. So one of the biggest tactics I think is so important is, just take 30 seconds at the top of a meeting. Why are we here? What happened the last time we talked? Why is this important to you? Why is this meaningful? And really remember that they are not thinking just about you. They are optimizing for a global maximum and not for the local that you're optimizing for.
00:09:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jessica Fain
[00:09:06] S1: Essentially, this is how to help someone in this world that is running around from meeting to meeting without context on most things, maybe hasn't have time to go to the bathroom. How do we help them see what you want them to see, and maybe buy into your vision and suggestions? [00:09:21] S0: Yeah. I think that one of the ways that I phrase this is, how do you get the best out of your exec? How do you help them be their best selves? We often think about how we show up in a meeting, or the doc that we wrote, or the prototype that we've got ready, but we don't think about how they can be at their best. How do we give them the right kind of information in the way that they communicate? We as product leaders have to be communication chameleons. We have to be speaking their language, like love languages, but appropriate for work. And you have to think about, do they really turn a spark with a design, with a customer story, with a dashboard, with an experiment? And how do you understand how their best brain, how their best expertise, gets turned on to give you the best of themselves? But part of that is literally just setting up the meeting effectively, so that they can have the context, the wherewithal, the sort of breadth at the beginning of the meeting, to dive into it.
00:09:21 · Jessica Fain, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:09:21] S0: Yeah. I think that one of the ways that I phrase this is, how do you get the best out of your exec? How do you help them be their best selves? We often think about how we show up in a meeting, or the doc that we wrote, or the prototype that we've got ready, but we don't think about how they can be at their best. How do we give them the right kind of information in the way that they communicate? We as product leaders have to be communication chameleons. We have to be speaking their language, like love languages, but appropriate for work. And you have to think about, do they really turn a spark with a design, with a customer story, with a dashboard, with an experiment? And how do you understand how their best brain, how their best expertise, gets turned on to give you the best of themselves? But part of that is literally just setting up the meeting effectively, so that they can have the context, the wherewithal, the sort of breadth at the beginning of the meeting, to dive into it. [00:10:23] S1: The other thing I always tell people I managed is, it's your fault if the leaders didn't buy into your idea. You can't just be like, "Ah, they just don't see it. It's not my fault." They agreed to do something else. I always tell them, "That's just you're not able to influence them and convince them that you're right." [00:10:40] S0: Yeah. And Annie Pearl, who was my first PM manager back at Box. [00:10:47] S1: Also former podcast guest.