Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:10:32 · Casey Winters
[00:10:32] S0: Yeah. Sure thing. So this is something I started noticing while managing, you know, PMs and product designers at Eventbrite, and it's now coming up with, with Whatnot as I hire... Help them hire new PMs, is the environment in which a lot of product managers have come up is is very distorted from when you and I started doing this kind of work. I think we used to always describe PMs as, you know, this gang of misfits. We all started in different functions. We all had different strengths and weaknesses, and the PM team, you know, gained as a whole from that diversity of skills and and previous experiences. So what I noticed is when we started doing product reviews at Eventbrite, if there was any sort of, like, uncertainty in a problem or a solution, the product manager, instead of, like, shipping to learn, would talk about all this research they have to do to to really learn the problems, really learn the solution. You know? And and my feedback would be like, no. Like, we... You know, user research is a scarce resource. We have to reserve it for the areas that have extreme uncertainty and a high leverage for getting to certain. So if you're redesigning the login page for Eventbrite, you don't need to use that resource to learn what to do. Just go see what FAANG and the top unicorns did. They probably did a good job. And, you know, even if they didn't, all of our customers also use those products, so they're gonna be familiar with us copying any approach that they've taken. So I think we sort of forgot in the industry that many times the fastest way to learn is to ship. So then if you actually get them to skip research and just go look at competitors, another thing I was noticing is I get, like, a list of options other companies have done, but there would be no analysis of why those companies chose different options and what's, you know, most applicable, you know, for us. So it got me thinking, like, okay, every new person in the product team is acting like they work at Google and have these infinite resources and infinite time to make sure everything is perfect. And there became such this focus on the right way of doing product management that no one's taken any risk. And I felt like, oh, am I responsible for this? Like, I've created a bunch of, you know, frameworks on Reforge. You know, I'm onboarding these UPMs.
00:12:46 · Casey Winters
It's like, is this is this my fault? But, you know, you know, in Reforge, we're building frameworks that are tools in a in a toolkit. You pull them out when relevant. They're not a coloring book, you know, to stay, you know, inside the lines of. So at one point, I got so fed up. I wrote, like, an internal blog post, and I called it on best practices and breakfast rituals. And I talked about how there were these articles about the morning habits of the most successful people. And if you try to do all those things, it'd take you, like, six hours every morning. And there was this article, I think it was on Business Insider or something, about this futurist at Google, and he talked about all the pills and food heats for breakfast every morning to try to live longer. And the reporter estimated that it cost him 1,000,000 a year to have these habits. So I was like, hey. I wanna make it clear. At Eventbrite, we don't have that much money. We don't have that much time. There's no framework that allows you to not use your brain at this company and just follow some sort of process for success in in this profession. So I I adopted this thing into, like, a a public blog post that's on my blog now. But now that I've had some time outside of Eventbrite, I feel like I at least partially missed the mark on what's really going on. You know, I see this with, like, whatnot because one of the things I'm helping them with is interviewing ICPMs again, which I haven't, you know, done in a while. And it's fascinating interviewing a PM or managers early in their career because Whatnot is a startup. And and, you know, you know better than most of us as a former founder of one. Startups typically require us to wear lots of hats. You have to write SQL. You have to talk directly to customers. You have to prep marketing and sales. And most importantly, you have to make a lot of decisions under uncertainty, which you wouldn't necessarily expect a PM to do at, you know, say, at Google. But it all boils down to using your brain in different ways. You know, Lisa, who's on our legal team, she called Eventbrite a public startup because the pandemic basically erased her business, and we had to build it back from scratch.
00:14:52 · Casey Winters
So now that I'm doing these interviews, and whether they come from a small startup, a unicorn, or a public company, they all sort of look the same because there's been so much funding to all these companies. Every company's been acting like they're Google with Google margins, meaning a lot of engineering support, a lot of design support, a lot of research support, lots of analysts around them. And they actually seem pretty ill prepared for a real start up or even a public company with some uncertainty around it, like Eventbrite. So you start getting these weird responses in the interview process. You ask them to solve a problem, and they'd say things like, I can't even begin to come up with solutions until I see all the data and talk to customers. And I'm like, yeah. I get that that's something you would normally do if you took the job, but, like, you don't have the data. You can't talk to customers. Make a decision now. What would you do? I wanna see how creative you are. I wanna see how much you're intuiting about the real problem and solution, and they can't really answer. And then, you know, my follow-up, which I don't ask, but what I really wanna ask is like, so when's the last time you used your brain versus followed a process someone else designing your company? Because, like, I want the former, not the latter.
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.