Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:16:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Casey Winters
[00:16:08] S1: Wow. Amazing. There's a lot of things I wanna dig into here, and I was gonna ask why you call it zero interest rate phenomenon, but I think what I'm hearing is it's when interest rates are zero, everyone's got a lot of money, things are going great, everyone looks like they're killing it, successful, everyone thinks they've got it all figured out. And then when that goes away, it's like, oh, shit, maybe maybe not so. [00:16:27] S0: And also, think zero interest rates allowed every startup to operate like it was a public company with billions of dollars. Yeah. And, you know, that's gonna go away over the next five years. And it and it sort of takes us back to what product management used to be like, which was, you know, you didn't have all these resources around. You didn't have all this time to figure it out because if you don't figure out now and make it work, you may run out of, you know, funding. Right? [00:16:51] S1: Yeah. Like, a very concrete thing that's changed is a lot of research teams have been laid off because they grew really large and companies kinda found maybe... We don't need the... Like, of all the things we can cut, it's probably an area we can cut. [00:17:02] S0: Yep. For sure. [00:17:04] S1: There's probably PMs listening to this wondering, shoot. Am I one of these? Am I just, like, following a bunch of frameworks? What's your advice for someone that may fear that, oh, shoot, this is maybe who I am, and I don't wanna necessarily be this, and what could they maybe do?
00:17:17 · Casey Winters
[00:17:17] S0: I always advise going to companies where you can, you know, learn quickly and and try things. Right? And I think, you know, it's certainly okay to, like, learn a bunch of frameworks. There's a reason I've invested a ton of time in Reforge because I think it actually really does help people to see how other people have built things in a way that they can, you know, scale to their other companies. But you have to understand that the job is not to follow the process. The job is not to learn every framework possible. The job is to figure out how to add value to customers that translates into value to to the business. And, you know, just reorient your north star if you've gotten away from that. When I joined Eventbrite, you know, there was this team that didn't ship anything in a quarter. And, you know, I went to the designer who I knew, and, you know, I know that he, you know, likes to likes to get stuff out there and likes to get feedback. And I was like, dude, you didn't ship anything. Like, how could you have gone the entire quarter, not shipped any of your designs, and felt that that was okay? And And if you didn't feel it was okay, why just censor yourself? Come to me. Tell me why this team is not letting you ship. There's just no way you can get better as a designer. There's no way you can have the impact on the company. There's no way you can have an impact on our on our users. So, you know, those are some things that that come to mind to that question.
00:18:36 · Lenny Rachitsky, Casey Winters
[00:18:36] S1: So if you're a PM on a team that maybe isn't shipping, maybe is overusing research, do you have any advice of just, like, when it makes sense to invest in research? Say you have the resources. Like, is there kind of a rule of thumb you have of, like, okay. Let's actually spend the time on this first? [00:18:50] S0: I think about it a little bit depending on the type of job you have and the types of customers you have. So, you know, the more scale you have tends to be you have less sophisticated customers because you're generally, like, you know, consumer thing where the customers are rational. They're not experts. And that's generally where you just try things, you measure the impact they have, and you only really bring in new search research when the impact seems confusing. Right? But you can run experiments. Like, you can get data really easily. So biased towards, you know, getting stuff out there and seeing what what users respond to. [00:19:29] S1: In consumer in consumer products. Interesting.
00:19:31 · Casey Winters
[00:19:31] S0: If you're super enterprise, it's kinda the opposite. Right? Each customer, first off, is sophisticated and tend to be rational. They're paying you, like, 6 figures or more, and you could talk to the customers and sales who knows the customers really well directly, And they tell you what they want. They tell you what they're willing to pay for. You build it. They pay you. Bing bang boom. Right? It's not obviously as simple as that, but, you're basically doing the research directly with the customer and with the sales team and and translating that to things that are strategic to to the business. And I I would say those are the two extremes probably most people are familiar with. But we now have a lot of companies in the middle where they have more customers. Those customers are more sophisticated. They're consumers. They're maybe employees at companies or they're small businesses. And that's where you have to be more more nuanced, and and this is, of course, where Eventbrite was on, hey. When do I really lean in on research? When do I lean in on data? When do I pay attention to internal feedback? So, you know, for Eventbrite, we really tried to focus research on the b to b side of Eventbrite where the problems seem big but not well defined enough. Or that problem's well defined but we just really don't feel like we have the right solution yet. And, you know, if research is gonna be, a scarce resource inside the company, which I think it will in most places, you have to figure out where it's a high leverage area, which means either really big problem, we don't we don't understand it well enough, or we know the problem's big, we understand it well, but we're just not sure if our solution's gonna, at any way, like, you know, hit the mark.
00:21:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Casey Winters
[00:21:06] S1: Makes me think about some of the best researchers I've worked with, and they often tell me, like, we don't need to do research on this. We have enough information. Like, we we have other things we should be doing. [00:21:13] S0: I I love it when they say that. Yes. [00:21:15] S1: Yeah. This would have been a really good segue to another topic I wanna talk about, which is around gut instincts versus team expertise, which we're gonna get to, but I have a couple more questions along these lines. Sure. You talked about interviewing PMs at Whatnot. Can you actually describe Whatnot just because you mentioned a couple times just so people know what we're talking about? [00:21:31] S0: So Whatnot's a a live streaming marketplace, mostly focused on the collectibles market. So, you know, sellers, whether it's like, you know, baseball cards or women's handbags or sneakers, you know, they'll go live on video and show you the products they have that they're selling, and people who are watching the streams can engage with the sellers and bid on, you know, different items. So kind of like Twitch meets eBay would be the you describe it. [00:21:54] S1: Awesome. And I'll just mention I'm a tiny angel investor in that company. [00:21:56] S0: Oh, that's why you brought it up. Okay. I get it. Yeah.
00:21:56 · Casey Winters, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:21:56] S0: Oh, that's why you brought it up. Okay. I get it. Yeah. [00:21:59] S1: I just wanted to make sure people understood what this word was because it's like a a fun word, whatnot. But what I wanted to actually get to is you said you were interviewing a lot of product managers for them. Yeah. What is your approach to interviewing PMs? What do you find is a is a really good signal for someone that's gonna be successful? [00:22:14] S0: I feel like the whole thing's gotten so performative. [00:22:17] S1: Mhmm.