Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:30:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, Sean Ellis
[01:30:11] S0: Well, amazing segue to the final question. Actually, final question is I wanted to ask you about any ways you've been using AI or ways you think AI will impact the work you're doing or other folks are doing, and maybe you just answered it, but tell me. [01:30:25] S1: No. I'll touch on a couple. One is that probably the funnest way that I'm using it today... Like, obviously, I've done it for coming up with experiment ideas, but the funnest way I personally use it is I get a lot of people asking me for advice and I don't have very much time to answer with thoughtful answers to people. And so almost every question that I get, I go to ChatGPT and say, How would Sean Ellis answer this? And gives me an initial draft to make a couple of tweaks and definitely allows me to answer a lot more. It helps to have a book that's indexed in there and lots of writing. [01:31:07] S0: That is so funny. And is that the question? That's the simp... As simple as the prompt is, how would Sean Ellis [01:31:11] S1: answer it? Yeah. Because I know a lot of times, it'll say, Sean Ellis, author of Hacking Growth, da da da da da, believes that, you know, and then and then it'll, like, help obviously pull that part out in the answer. [01:31:21] S0: Oh my god. So like you're just one step away from a Chrome extension or something that just automatically plugs that into your...
01:31:21 · Lenny Rachitsky, Sean Ellis
[01:31:21] S0: Oh my god. So like you're just one step away from a Chrome extension or something that just automatically plugs that into your... [01:31:26] S1: Yeah, exactly. Can and I can even start to have my, you know, personal system maybe start to answer some of those questions as me. But I I'm a little bit afraid to send something without reviewing it first because sometimes there's stuff that's pretty different from how I would answer it. But longer term, actually think, as I said, I think the cross functional challenge to growth is the thing that holds a lot of companies back from being able to implement this a bit later. Mostly like, yeah, product teams don't want to be at direction from marketing teams. They want to get direct marketing teams. Want to get direction from product teams and, maybe a growth layer can help to do these things. But I find that, you know, like if AI is essentially saying you're underperforming in this area of your business, you should drive some experiments in this area. It's a lot harder to kind of let ego get in the way when it's kind of dispassionate recommendations from a system. So I actually think the ability to come up with great experiments is going to keep growing with AI and identifying opportunities. Then obviously the analytical AI side of things is going to be really exciting in terms of being I do find with most companies, once once we get a real high velocity of experiments going, the bottleneck ends up happening more on the analysis side, and and I think AI will help a lot with that as well.
01:32:50 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:32:50] S0: Super cool. These are awesome examples. Okay. Sean, is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting Lightning Round, which we'll go through real fast because we've gone very long and I wanna let you go.
01:33:01 · Sean Ellis
[01:33:01] S1: Yeah. As I... As I've gone through and done a lot of, workshops and programs with companies, I keep coming back to this advice that I heard from guy Oleg Kubanov, which is, it often comes down to asking the right question at the right time how you figure things out. He's a former data scientist from Meta, where he basically boils data science down to learning how to ask the right questions. So I actually have a course with him called gopractice.io where that's really the big benefit of the course is to learn how to ask the right questions. And yeah, you learn how to query them in Amplitude, but more importantly, being able to ask the right question. I think it's kind of cool to hear that from a data scientist from Meta, the importance of that. But every time I'm going through exercises in my workshops, it almost always comes down to people who aren't able to come up with the right or a good answer for a challenging in a business, it's because they're not asking the obvious question. As soon as they ask, why aren't users downloading the software? Let's just ask them that question. That would be one example from my workshop. Who considers the product a must have? That part of getting to figuring out the must have kind of benefit that then allows you to hone in on product market fit. And so, right questions, right time, I think is a really important, way to think about, growth and even getting to product market fit.
01:34:39 · Lenny Rachitsky, Sean Ellis
[01:34:39] S0: I love this advice because I think it gives us a glimpse into how your brain has developed these really simple, seemingly simple ideas that end up being really powerful. And it feels like the advice is just think a lot about the question you need to ask because that'll get you just something that a lot of people just kind of under underthink or don't. There's, like, things... Just think maybe it's too simple. Like... [01:35:02] S1: Yeah. Or they just jump right into the solution side of things where they're where they're not really trying to understand what's going on. [01:35:08] S0: Yeah. Amazing. Okay. Well, with that, Sean, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? [01:35:14] S1: I am. [01:35:15] S0: Alright. Our first question is, what are two or three books you've recommended most to other people? [01:35:20] S1: Increasingly, I'm recommending a book called Presenting to Win that's been around forever, but, it really helped me with my presenting. So, of course, when I'm out traveling, I'm often sharing the stage with other speakers and yeah, I'd like to recommend that one to them. I've already talked about Nir Eyal's Hooked. I recommend that always. We'll just stick with two. That's a good two. [01:35:47] S0: Within presenting to win, is there one tip that sticks with you of like, here's something that really helped me be a better presenter?
01:35:47 · Lenny Rachitsky, Sean Ellis
[01:35:47] S0: Within presenting to win, is there one tip that sticks with you of like, here's something that really helped me be a better presenter? [01:35:52] S1: Ultimately, confidence in presenting comes down to having very well organized information that you're going to present. And when you organize it correctly, you are much more likely to deliver it with confidence. And so he basically says, if I had a presentation to do and I had an hour to present, I'd spend fifty five minutes creating the right presentation and then five minutes practicing it. But, yeah, there's a lot more to it. But that... [01:36:18] S0: Wow. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. We'll link to that book in the show notes. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? [01:36:24] S1: Yeah. So I've been binging the Olympics. I love that. Just, you know, watching people who, like, work their ass off for years and then maybe have thirty seconds to do the thing that they worked hard for. So Olympics have been awesome. Then And then the movie, I actually just saw BlackBerry. I don't know if you've seen that. [01:36:42] S0: Oh, story of the BlackBerry.