Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
01:09:52 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[01:09:52] S0: Oh yeah, it is how far do you push fully, automated review? [01:09:57] S1: Yes. Actually, well, this is a fun one with the content design check. I think we're looking for across all of it, how do you actually get what good looks like? And so actually the verification is still one that I think, and that's kind of like the second and the third that I think there's a lot more opportunities there for us, but the how far to push, I think looking at where we think experts still matters and then also again, have to keep asking ourselves, okay, is there a way to leverage that expertise to also automate? I think looking across the whole end-to-end experience, making sure we're not missing, I think we come at it from an engineering standpoint, but making sure on experiences how we think about those other areas. I think there's definitely still more that we can do there. [01:10:44] S0: Basically, how do you set up a verification that the experience is what you wanted it to be? [01:10:51] S1: Exactly, and I think that one is still a hard one to crack because you kind of mentioned evaluations because some of it for sure is accuracy, but it's also that experience. So that's something that we're still kind of thinking through. [01:11:03] S0: Awesome. Is there anything else that's like, "Oh, this has changed recently. We got to figure out how to rethink the way we operate," or is this kind of the big ones?
01:11:03 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[01:11:03] S0: Awesome. Is there anything else that's like, "Oh, this has changed recently. We got to figure out how to rethink the way we operate," or is this kind of the big ones? [01:11:11] S1: I think because with routines and everything being more async, I think there is starting to be a high load on our context switching because I even remember myself, I was like oh, I kicked off, and so I think that's probably another thing we have to think about whether for team members or users, how can we actually make the experience better to reduce that load? Because I do see the context switching load increasing. [01:11:39] S0: If you have 20 agents running, there's just endless checking in and reviewing and you have to remember what you were doing there. It's like such an interesting world where the idea flow we talked about before, like engineers and most people, there's less of the just hours of flow, but now the agents can kind of just remind you, "Here's where you're at." The reset to switch almost is easier because you don't have to relearn everything. You don't have to reunderstand the code base and the architecture. You can kind of just like, "Okay, but here's what we're trying to do." It's kind of like both, got better, got worse.