Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:47:52 · Jessica Fain, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:47:52] S0: It's literally your job. I think the way that product management has worked for a long time is you basically get funding for your ideas in the... You basically get funding for your ideas in the form of engineering, design, cross-functional resourcing. That is, you should consider that VC money that's been invested in you, and your CFO, your CPO, your CEO is expecting a return. And so what is the way that you are showing that you are building great products that honors that investment in you? And sure, you can go into a startup and be the sole decision maker, and that is a very, very valid way to work. But if you work with other people, having them excited, interested, passionate, bought in to what you're doing, will make everything easier. It is also the job, right? You also have to. But I think the thing I want people to take away is that it's really the way to build well. When people are motivated, when they feel purpose, when they feel like this is really something that I believe in, they work harder, they support you more, they talk about you in rooms that you're not in. And so it's just actually the way you deliver great results. [00:49:15] S1: I think that's such an important framing. Okay. What other tactics, what other techniques work in helping leaders get influenced? [00:49:24] S0: Yeah. Get influenced. I love that. I love that. [00:49:27] S1: Be influenced.
00:49:27 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jessica Fain
[00:49:27] S1: Be influenced. [00:49:29] S0: Yeah. We should have a stamp, like influenced, at the end. So I think one of the things that people misunderstand is the constraints that they are bound by versus their leadership. Execs are not ... They don't have the same boundaries of budget and headcount and timeline that you feel. They can move people around in the organization. They can ask for more resourcing. They can get creative. They can elevate projects, kill projects. And so you have to come to them with that mindset of, "Hey, with today's resourcing, with this many engineers or this kind of tooling or this kind of investment, here's what I can get. But I'm thinking of the 10X case. I'm thinking of the accelerated case. And if that's what you want, and if that's aligned with your incentives, here's what I need to be successful." And so I think that people think, "Okay, well, I've got my pizza team and I've got my four engineers and what you're asking is not possible." Well, if it's not possible, tell them why not. Come back and say, "The thing that you're asking for, I'm super stoked about that. I need eight more people. I need you twice a week for an hour. I need much closer alignment with our marketing team, and I'm not sure how to get that." You have to think about what are the constraints that hold you back that they can actually help you a lot with. And people miss out on this all the time, of not asking for what they need to be successful, especially when the ask from the executive seems unreasonable.
00:51:09 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jessica Fain
[00:51:09] S1: This is such a good piece of advice. Just if you get them excited enough, things can significantly change in terms of resources and prioritization. Your job is to help them see how massive an opportunity this is and not just give you what you want, but just like, wow, okay, here's the way to unblock this thing. Here's how we can go like, okay, this is going to be our new big bet. Let's go big here. [00:51:31] S0: Yeah, absolutely. This is going to be our new big bet. And this comes back to aligning with what the company's trying to accomplish and also the urgency. So some things, if you added a dozen more people or perfect alignment with go to-market, yeah, you could get them to market faster. But is that the most important thing for the company goals? Is right now the answer? Is accelerating this in this way actually going to do more? Or is it something else that's actually more aligned? And so I think it's still being so rooted in the company goals and what the exec is trying to accomplish and what your users really need to be successful so that you can say, "In order to accelerate our goals, here's what we can do."
00:51:31 · Jessica Fain, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:51:31] S0: Yeah, absolutely. This is going to be our new big bet. And this comes back to aligning with what the company's trying to accomplish and also the urgency. So some things, if you added a dozen more people or perfect alignment with go to-market, yeah, you could get them to market faster. But is that the most important thing for the company goals? Is right now the answer? Is accelerating this in this way actually going to do more? Or is it something else that's actually more aligned? And so I think it's still being so rooted in the company goals and what the exec is trying to accomplish and what your users really need to be successful so that you can say, "In order to accelerate our goals, here's what we can do." [00:52:13] S1: Like if you were in charge of a company, you'd be so excited if someone came to you with a 10X idea that's going to change the trajectory of your product. That's what everybody wants. And so that is a really powerful way of approaching all these things. Obviously not every idea is going to be a big idea. Not every idea is a great idea. A lot of times these take time also. Maybe speak to that. Just like say you have a big idea and they're like, "Nah," what are some expectations to set for people that come up with a big idea that just isn't getting any traction?
00:52:47 · Jessica Fain
[00:52:47] S0: It really depends on what kind of organization you're working in. If you're working in a smaller organization, if that big idea is something that you can build on your own or you can build within, versus if you need a large scale investment ... I think the real thing about building toward a big idea, towards something net new, the key is really outside and around the executive. So if the executive is the decision maker on whether we're going to invest here, they also want to understand from their peers, from other experts, why this actually matters. If you have something net new that you want to bring to market and customer success thinks it would really accelerate expansion rates, or the marketing team thinks that signups would be 10X because of this, if you have that cross-functional alignment, and this is where a lot of these lessons don't just apply if you're going into a product executive meeting, but that if you're influencing your cross-functional execs and your cross-functional stakeholders to be advocates on your behalf, I think that we now have more tools than ever to, as product folks, build out the V1, prototype something, build your own app, build the messy version of it, get feedback, iterate, and be socializing that in a way that creates a groundswell of buy-in to the point that the exec can't say no to the funding.
00:54:19 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jessica Fain
[00:54:19] S1: Along those lines, it feels like to me, the biggest reason that a leader doesn't buy into your pitch is you just have different information. They don't see what you see, you don't see what they see. They have all this other stuff that they're looking at and trying to decide. Maybe speak to just that skill of trying to clarify information on both sides. [00:54:43] S0: I'm thinking about a tool April Underwood taught me. She said she used to go into product strategy meetings with Stewart and was really trying to extract some of his ideas, but she was always holding the whiteboard marker. And so there was this back and forth between them in the conversation of, I'm trying to understand deeply what you're seeing in the market, what you're feeling in the business, what your instincts are, but I'm also going to package that in a way that is translatable, is actionable, is in a framework that you might not have had in your head. And so that is like a great tool for marrying that leader's instincts with your ability to sort of not synthesize their approach, but really take that approach and accelerate it for marrying what you know about the world and what they know about the world.