Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:42:18 · G2 Patel
[00:42:18] S0: I don't know if it was ... I mean, I instinctively kind of knew it, but it was very, very accentuated at Cisco, because when people say, "Oh, is scale hard?" And my perspective has always been that the absence of scale is way harder than scale. What do I mean by that? If I have a startup with three people and we need to prosecute another idea, and that idea requires five people working on it, I have to go raise money, or I have to pivot my entire business. If you have 30,000 people and you have an idea that requires five people, you just figure out a way that you allocate the dollars internally and say, "Let's go prosecute this idea." So, in my mind, I always felt like absence of scale was way harder than the presence of scale. And operating within scale seemed like it was like, yeah, you have more opportunity to do it. What I found over the years, not just at Cisco, but even when I ... Because I ran a small startup in Chicago for 17 years before I moved over to the Valley, what I found in the large companies is, the communication framework and the lossiness of communication, the telephone game, so to say, has a profoundly negative effect if you're not intentional about it and if you're not careful of it. And there was this board member that we had, there's a couple board members, our lead director, Michael Capellas is amazing. There's this other board member, Kevin is amazing, and then there's this one board member, Wes Bush, who we recently rolled off, but he used to be on our board. And when I got this job, he pulled me aside, said, "Jeetu, I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to give you some advice, and take it or leave it, but I think it's going to be important for you to keep it in mind." I'm like, "What's that?" And he goes, "Whatever you do, don't think about your story of the company as a marketing exercise. Think about it as the most intrinsic foundational exercise of the company. And always be the custodian of the message. Don't delegate that to someone else to give.
00:44:36 · G2 Patel
Because if you have 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 layers between you and the person who's actually doing the job in the front line, what you don't want to do is play the telephone game and assume that people will just cascade it when you go to your team and then say, 'Okay, that team will cascade to the next team, cascade to the next team, cascade to the next team.' Every one of them will add a flavor with well-intentioned, and then by the time it gets to the end, people won't know what it is. So always own telling the story." And I'm like, "That seems like it's a lot because we have a very broad portfolio. We do all of these events. It's like, I'm going to have to stand on stage for 90 minutes and just talk about it." He's like, "Please do that. Make sure you don't." And initially, the hidden benefit that came out of it that I did not realize is it massively, Lenny, simplified our business. And you know why? Because we have such a broad business with so many different industries, it's impossible for someone to be a deep expert in every single one of them across the board. There's just way too much surface area. But the things that we want to convey to the market that the market should take away from us, if that story is not something that I understand well enough to be able to convey it, how do I first expect 20,000 of my sellers to be able to go tell it to the market? And how do I expect my customers to be able to digest that story? There's zero chance that would happen. And so, that was my big takeaway from this, which is don't delegate the storytelling. And the storytelling is not a marketing exercise after you built the product. The story is why you build the product to make the story come real. And so, make sure that the story is there first, and then that story has evidence and proof based on the products that you're building.
00:46:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, G2 Patel
[00:46:44] S1: I had a conversation with Matt MacInnis, who's COO now CPO at Rippling, and hit a similar piece of advice, which I think is also, it's like adjacent advice, which is "The intensity of an idea or a plan drops at every level that it goes from CO to the next layer and layer. And your job as a leader is to maintain that intensity, not to buffer it from the employees, but to maintain exactly the same intensity."" And it feels like that's in addition to also just keep the story the same. Like don't filter it, don't change it. Although your advice is even different, just like you actually go to the team working on it and tell the story yourself. Don't even let- [00:47:23] S0: I want to make sure that they hear it from me directly so that there's no lossiness. We have this concept in networking called packet loss. When you actually send packets over a wire and you have a loss of packet, then actually there's loss of data. You don't want to have packet loss in your storytelling from you to the person on the front line because- [00:47:43] S1: The direct ethernet Cat 5 connection.
00:47:43 · Lenny Rachitsky, G2 Patel
[00:47:43] S1: The direct ethernet Cat 5 connection. [00:47:45] S0: This is just a direct connection and there's no packet loss of this one. You got to make sure it gets to the intended audience. And I think the reason for that is, as companies get large, they can lose touch with the front lines. Everyone gets really good with the math of the business, but they don't really always preserve the soul of the business. And there's a lossiness that happens, because if you have seven, eight layers between you and the front line, even the message that's coming back to you from them is actually getting lossy. And so what you have to do is just preserve ... And I think what was said earlier about the intensity is the same way, which is you got to preserve the intensity. You got to preserve the sanctity of the message, and you got to preserve the clarity of the message so that everyone is clear on the direction we're going down. And if you can stay clear and stay motivated about that direction and make sure that everyone's on the same page and what needs to be done to execute, you will have success. If not, you'll actually have guaranteed failure. [00:48:45] S1: How do you actually operationalize this without just being overloaded with work and constantly having to meet with every team and remind them of the story?
00:48:53 · G2 Patel
[00:48:53] S0: The first thing I feel is, you have to have very clear thinking because the clarity of thought is what brings clarity of communication. So, you have to spend the time with your team in sweating the details on what it is that you want to do and why you want to do it. The context of why is so lost, and constantly reminding people why it's important and having the least amount of asymmetry between the topmost layer in the organization and the bottommost layer is super. Now, by the way, I'm a Section 16 officer. There are certain things that, for example, you're in a quiet period you can't go talk about to someone else during that time period, but that's not allowed. However, the most amount of context that you can provide them in the way that you can because you're allowed to, the better off you are. And always treat people like adults. What I've found is, oftentimes when you go into corporate environments, like people start becoming very sterile in the facts that they provide. And sometimes it's okay to just say, "Hey, we screwed up here. This was really bad." That's not meant to ... One of the things that I found to be very counterintuitive, because every management book that you read will tell you otherwise. What do they say? Praise in public and criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. I think what you have to do is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public. But when you're in private, take that moment to build the trust. Because if you build that trust and you tell them that you've got their back and you create a level of safety there in public, you don't want to be in a mode of posturing. You want to be in a mode of problem-solving. When you're just giving people perfunctory compliments all the time, and everything's just hunky-dory. Rose-colored glass is great. All your dashboards look green, but you're growing the business at 1.5%. There's an asymmetry there, something's broken. It's like, what do we need to do over here? And so what I tend to do is use the exact opposite approach. I tend to be very, very direct in public, be respectful, but be direct in public. This is not working. Let me tell you why it's not working. We got to face the facts. And then be very, very clear with people that you got their back in private.
00:51:29 · G2 Patel
And don't be stingy with words on that front, because I feel like there are times when people are very stingy with words with people in private. You can't be stingy with words over there. And don't be stingy with critique in public, because I think people need to make sure that, "We are solving problems together." And if we don't know the play that we're executing, if we don't know the things that we're going to need to do, then I am not really certain. If you're making collective progress, and I think it's not going to be fulfilling to either you or the recipient at some point, and those compliments will feel hollow because you didn't mean them. Because you were trying to put it in between. Like Ben Horowitz says, and hard things about hard things that you have a shit sandwich. You say something really nice to someone, then you say something that's not really nice, and then you put no, just treat people like adults. Tell them the facts, watch your tone. I still have to work on that. There are times when I get very passionate. People think like, but watch your tone and make sure that you debate. Conflict is a necessary condition of business, but the only way that you can have productive conflict is if you've established trust. And the only way that you can establish trust is by making sure that you spend the time to establish the trust. So spend the time to establish the trust, but then focus on the best idea, winning and actually having the debate.