Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:22:17 · Lenny Rachitsky, Casey Winters
[00:22:17] S1: Mhmm. [00:22:17] S0: It's like interviewing is handing out Oscars based on who's prepared the best tell me about a time response versus actually assessing, like, who can choose the job we're hiring for. So it's like most PMs are better PM interviewers than PMs now. There's this quote from a movie called The Way of the Gun. I don't know if you've ever seen it. Nope. But Benicio del Toro says in it, it's like, these days, they wanna be criminals more than they wanna commit crime. Mhmm. And I think about that quote a lot when it comes to interviewing. So I would say I'm a bit contrarian here in my approach. I don't ask about your work history. I don't care about your perfectly practiced answers. I'm gonna give you real scenarios that I expect from the role. I wanna hear how you'd approach them. And if you can't come up with a few reasonable ideas, figure out how to test them quickly without analyst support or research, I'm just not interested. And I'm not saying this is a perfect approach. Interviewing is a very lossy format. But the more I can see them do the job we're hiring for with questions, whether it's a presentation, a prompt, that gets me the most comfortable that they know the job they're signing up for, that they've shown in a practice scenario they can do it, and they actually enjoyed it in some way. [00:23:28] S1: Are there, like, red flags you look for in these interviews? Like, one is maybe said over, like, I can't even begin to answer this without research and data. Is there anything else?