Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:19:49 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[01:19:49] S0: Yeah. I imagine everybody is struggling with this considering the pace of change and the phase of hiring, just like... Especially at a company like Anthropic that's in this crazy, the most unprecedented growth trajectory in history. I could see how that could be a challenge with so much change. So it makes sense. Even at Airbnb when I was there, that was quite a growth trajectory and that was nothing like what you guys are going through and that was a constant topic of conversation. How do we maintain the culture? [01:20:19] S1: Actually, I'm curious, what was your experience at BAB to maintain the culture as we're growing?
01:20:19 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:20:19] S1: Actually, I'm curious, what was your experience at BAB to maintain the culture as we're growing? [01:20:24] S0: There's a couple of things. One is just what worked well is the founders being obsessed with it. Every all hands, every big meeting is just reminding of the culture and the value of the culture and what the values are. Just the founders top down being obsessed with it was a big part of it. You just couldn't have a meeting without that coming up as a thing. The other is a memory I always come back to is we had Sheryl Sandberg's Meta come do a fireside chat and somebody asked her just, how do you maintain culture as you scale? Because we're just growing so fast and it's so hard to deal with all this change and culture and all these new people. And her advice was, "This is actually a problem you want to have because this means you're growing and doing well and this is normal versus nothing will change if you're doing badly." That's a much worse situation when you're not growing and you're not hiring like crazy. That's a much worse situation that will cause even more pain and suffering. So this is a good problem you're dealing with is her advice, which has always stuck with me.
01:21:32 · Fiona Fung
[01:21:32] S1: Oh, that's great. It's interesting hearing you talk, I think one of the important things to Claude Code and Cowork team is whether ICs or managers, but this is a thing I especially as for managers on the team is really important that we all talk about for sure what's going out, but also just be open about what's not going well because then if we can actually have a conversation of what's not going well, that's how we can actually go ahead and address it. Speaking of what keeps me up in that, my nightmare is, especially if someone's in a manager position and I'm like, "Hey, how are things going? Everything's fine." I'm like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm not doing fine. I know this thing's..." You know how there was this meme of the dog drinking a cup of coffee in a room that's on fire? That is my nightmare. So that's actually a discussion I have with a lot of folks on the team by special managers, especially when they first join up, "Hey, let's always have these open conversations so that we can solve problems together."
01:22:28 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:22:28] S0: I imagine this is something a lot of people struggle with seeing so many people around them doing super well, at least seemingly doing well, everything's going great, I'm growing, this awesome company or just like everything, it's like hard to actually be honest and say, "It's not going great. I'm struggling here. I'm falling behind," because everyone around you is just like on the surface feeling like they're killing it. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you either want to leave listeners with, anything else that we didn't cover? Anything else that's important that you wanted to share?
01:23:03 · Fiona Fung
[01:23:03] S1: Maybe one thing is just a suggestion because we talked about how can Claude do automate. One other thing that's really big on Claude Code and Cowork team culture is explicit permission to kill processes that no longer serve us. And so maybe a suggestion is for anyone working on a team or leading teams, what's one process that you either dread doing or is really highly noisy or is really expensive in terms of just a lot of... Or something that's just very manual, pick one thing and first ask is it still having its purpose? For example, when even our planning... Actually, that was my own big first learning when I first joined Claude Code. I'm like, "Hey, maybe we should do a six-month roadmap doc, but we're going to do it super lightweight because I don't want to waste a lot of time planning." And I felt we did a really lightweight process, but that was such a good learning for me because the exercise was good to kickstart conversations and enter aligned, but three months into it, I'm like, "Wait, have we still referenced stuff?" Because so much has changed. So that was also something I... And so that was also something I changed that I myself brought in thinking, "Hey, maybe this will help." So always be open to learning and always ask yourself whatever process you have, is it still serving its purpose just because the field is changing so fast?
01:24:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[01:24:26] S0: I love that advice. I got to follow up on this real quick. How do you think about planning now? Do you do any planning? Is it just a month long roadmap? What's the simple way to explain where you're at with that? [01:24:37] S1: Yeah, I call it JIT planning now, just in time planning. So it is around, because yeah, I think six months was too long. So now for sure some projects will take more than a month, but we try to do a month planning, really lightweight. Actually, there's not even dogs. It's really just us aligning on a little spreadsheet of what we think is important. But even that one, I'm thinking through, hey, every week we should probably still keep what we're trying is here are the month's priorities and we're going to try it out, but I have a feeling like every week we'll probably want to do really quick like, "Hey, just to check, yep, this is still this month's priorities, good." But now we've shrunk it to JIT monthly planning. [01:25:17] S0: So it's monthly meaning for the next month, here's a little sheet/Excel spreadsheet of what we're planning to do for the next month and then every week check-in is this still what we're planning to do for the next month? [01:25:29] S1: Yeah. [01:25:29] S0: So cool.