Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:03:40 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:40] S1: Yeah. [01:03:41] S0: Oh, man. I want to come back to your point about obsession with the product. Living, breathing, the product, dogfooding. I talked to a bunch of people that work with you about you, and that's the thing that came up most, just your obsession with living and breathing the product, using the product constantly, whatever it is you're building, this idea of dogfooding. Talk about just why that is so important, why that's something you instill within your teams and reports.
01:04:06 · Fiona Fung
[01:04:06] S1: Oh, love it. Yeah, I think it's really and this has worked for me. It's just been a really good way for me to keep a pulse. Anytime you build product, there's a dream. You're really hoping to enable an experience or making an experience better. So I think that helps me keep really close to the pulse. I also think, and maybe for sure on Visual Studio, that was where I got this love of it, but it's interesting because even Marketplace, I remembered once in a while, even after I left the team actually, one time I had a MacBook Air I wanted to sell. I'm like, "Oh, I haven't sold anything on Marketplace." And I could not believe it the minute I put it up for sale, a seller or buyer tried to scam me, and it was an interesting new scam vector I didn't detect, but that goes to, again, people will use your products in ways that you may not expect. And so especially as leaders or even anyone on the team, we all have different life, actually, it's funny when I was supporting the VR and AR teams, somehow how I used VR, the setup, I would always be able to find these really weird floor height issues. So that ended up being a, "Oh, I'm going to help us," because somehow I got a good repro environment, and so I think it's number one, that's how you keep your pulse on the product that you're building and don't get too lost in metrics and dashboards only, or presentations.
01:05:40 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[01:05:40] S0: I think that's such an important point you're saying there that I just want to make sure people here is just like there's always this idea of anecdotal evidence and just examples versus the data, and what you're saying here is as a product leader, as an engineer leader, you've found a lot of success in the anecdotes, the specific little one-offs that you experience as a user versus obsessing with the data only. [01:06:02] S1: Yeah, and actually sometimes it's also how I've been able to most effectively help the team. So for example, the last team I was on, I was leading a VR team and because back then I have not checked in any code into that code base just because I was really worried about messing up the operating system, but what was a gap? We were doing a lot of polish fixes and I'm like, "Hey, you know what? I'll use my job fitting time to actually vet how the experience looks." And so that was also probably a way that I felt I could still meaningfully contribute to help hold the quality bar for the team, and then like I say, every team member usually always really appreciates because I think as a lead leader, you're supporting folks on team that outside of metrics and everything, everybody really wants to make sure their work matters and just making sure that leaders use your product. I think folks feel the leaders, and then remain really engaged and not too distanced.
01:06:02 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:06:02] S1: Yeah, and actually sometimes it's also how I've been able to most effectively help the team. So for example, the last team I was on, I was leading a VR team and because back then I have not checked in any code into that code base just because I was really worried about messing up the operating system, but what was a gap? We were doing a lot of polish fixes and I'm like, "Hey, you know what? I'll use my job fitting time to actually vet how the experience looks." And so that was also probably a way that I felt I could still meaningfully contribute to help hold the quality bar for the team, and then like I say, every team member usually always really appreciates because I think as a lead leader, you're supporting folks on team that outside of metrics and everything, everybody really wants to make sure their work matters and just making sure that leaders use your product. I think folks feel the leaders, and then remain really engaged and not too distanced. [01:07:06] S0: And this connects a lot with your point that engineers need to become more product minded, that engineers need to become more PM-y, but this is like as an engineer, this is one way to do it. Use the product constantly and that'll help you understand what is missing in the product as a user because you're just using it.
01:07:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[01:07:06] S0: And this connects a lot with your point that engineers need to become more product minded, that engineers need to become more PM-y, but this is like as an engineer, this is one way to do it. Use the product constantly and that'll help you understand what is missing in the product as a user because you're just using it. [01:07:21] S1: That's right, and I would say if you're leading a team where it's really hard for you to use a product, then meet with customers. Whatever that other avenue is, I think that's also been really important too. Every time I've done customer visits, I always learn something new. Actually, I remember that was Facebook Marketplace, we're trying to launch to Latin America and so we were testing in Chile, and I remembered it just wasn't doing as well as the other regions. Everything else, we've tried it and then I remember, I'm like, oh yeah, and we had a really small research trip where I went to Chile and I remember getting us a whole bunch of Android phones for us. It was very small crew, like just three of us, and upon landing and upon me opening up these Android phones and I'm like, ah, the LTE connection was much slower than what we were used to in the US. So I'm like, "Oh, the Marketplace feed didn't even load very well on these low LTE situations." What a growth block that you can't even load, but again, that's why it's so important to always listen to customer feedback and get that fast feedback loop.
01:08:25 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[01:08:25] S0: I think it was Jeff Bezos that said if you have data and you have an anecdote, trust anecdote over the data, surprisingly and that's a great example. Okay, just a couple more questions. One is in your talk, you had this really interesting slide at the end of what questions you're kind of thinking about right now that you haven't figured out how to solve with how much it's changing. I'm going to read the three. I'm curious just like if it's still these three, if there's anything else like current problems we need to figure out that we haven't solved in how we operate. What you shared in your talk was do we still need separate iOS and Android organizations? How far do you push fully on automated reviews, and with role blurring, how do you ensure everyone's equally productive? Still problems, is there anything else that you're thinking about like, "Okay, we need to crack this. We haven't figured this out." [01:09:15] S1: You know the iOS Android one, I think and actually it's funny because speaking of the deep expertise, we definitely feel that it's really important to still bring on folks with those expertise, but we probably don't need as large because people are flexing. So it's again, making sure we have the Android and iOS experts, but then less of the larger kind of like mobile art one per, but again, that's still a balance that we're trying to figure out, do we have the right and enough expertise? Sorry, what was the second one? [01:09:52] S0: Oh yeah, it is how far do you push fully, automated review?