Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:12:16 · Tom Verrilli, Lenny Rachitsky
I imagine the same discussion went on for editing Tweets, which took another two and a half years. Sometimes things aren't actually that complicated. It's just weak leadership. [01:12:26] S1: Yeah, it's funny how far it's come. Now you can write entire blog posts on Twitter. Articles is a big bet. On the product market fit piece, I think even more important there is the network effects of a Twitter, which you spend a lot of time thinking about building marketplaces. To me, watching Elon basically change everything, I forget who Tweeted this, but just everything changed. The brand, the name, the website. [01:12:47] S0: Number of people working there, everything. [01:12:48] S1: Yeah, the people, the team. What was the thing that stayed the same? And it was basically the network effects of Twitter. It's the place to be, so everyone's there. And that's hard to break. Even in spite of how much he tried to mess it all up, it's still kicking. [01:13:03] S0: That's it. If you bottle lightning, genuinely you can tell.
01:13:03 · Tom Verrilli, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:13:03] S0: That's it. If you bottle lightning, genuinely you can tell. [01:13:06] S1: Yeah. Okay. I'm going to take us to a recurring corner of the podcast, Fail Corner. Why I like doing this is because people see people like you coming on the podcast, have this illustrious career, everything's going great constantly, you're just killing it. And they don't see the things that don't work out and the times that you failed. And in their life, things often go wrong. So the question for you is just what's an example of a time in your career where things failed, something you built, some career move you made that didn't work out, and then what'd you learn from that experience?
01:13:40 · Tom Verrilli
[01:13:40] S0: Honestly, mate, and it's very nice of you to say nice things, but I feel like I fail more often than I succeed across the course of my career. Genuinely, to the blog you referenced right at the start, I published in the back of that the actual document we use internally to talk about how we build. And it starts with batting .500 is the goal. So you're hoping to be right as often as you're wrong. So there's probably just too many specific examples of times I've screwed up in my career, but there probably is a really common thread to it. And I think it's probably an easy trap for any PM to fall into, which is averages mean nothing to the individual is probably the thing that I've really scarred by. In any sizable population, it's really attractive to go and look at average utility or average adoption of something. And then you find that only 3% of people use something. And you're like, "Cool, we can probably get rid of that feature. It's not used widely." But if you don't go a layer deeper, and be like, actually it's only 3% of something, but there's a group of people for whom it's 100% of what they do. This is their core use case. And for expediency's sake, because somebody doesn't want to maintain a feature anymore, you're just going to deprecate it. And then it turns out you blow up the use case of that group of humans. And then to your last point about network effects, the ongoing spiral effect of that can be enormous. I think about it a lot in e-commerce of this is somebody's business. If we're just not reliable or we're deprecating a feature, it's kind of like a Westfield Mall just turning off the power in the lead up to Christmas without thinking about it. And so there are real downstream impacts to people's businesses that often come from just a lack of nuance in understanding metrics, particularly averages. They just lie to you all the time. And I think I've probably screwed up in all of the ways in my career, but most of the time I've made genuinely I'm disappointed in myself levels of decisions, it's typically that I've relied on averages without thinking about the individual use cases that are hidden underneath.
01:15:36 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tom Verrilli
[01:15:36] S1: Makes me think about Jeff Bezos has a quote, "When you have data and an anecdote, trust the anecdote." [01:15:41] S0: Yeah, that's exactly right. [01:15:46] S1: Well, Tom, we've gone through everything I wanted to talk about. Is there anything else that you wanted to share? Anything you want to leave listeners with before we get to a very exciting lightning round? [01:15:56] S0: I think all I'd add, mate, I've really enjoyed the discussion, so thank you, is like- [01:15:59] S1: Same. [01:15:59] S0: ... I don't think there is one way to do product management, and I don't think there is one way that AI will shape the industry. So we're pretty confident that for Whatnot, the product we're building and the culture of the company that we have, that this model of fewer PMs who are more senior with a lot more autonomy is right for us. I don't pretend to presume that that will be true for the entire industry, but I do think there has never been a better time to go back to the roots of the actual product work and getting out of that theater. And I think that probably is true everywhere, even if you are still, there are people who are wonderful people managers and really derive their satisfaction from doing that and growing and coaching. And I'm sure there'll be loads of places where that's still valuable. So assume that at least half of what I've said is wrong in the same basis that half of the things I've probably ever shipped are not correct.
01:15:59 · Tom Verrilli, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:15:59] S0: ... I don't think there is one way to do product management, and I don't think there is one way that AI will shape the industry. So we're pretty confident that for Whatnot, the product we're building and the culture of the company that we have, that this model of fewer PMs who are more senior with a lot more autonomy is right for us. I don't pretend to presume that that will be true for the entire industry, but I do think there has never been a better time to go back to the roots of the actual product work and getting out of that theater. And I think that probably is true everywhere, even if you are still, there are people who are wonderful people managers and really derive their satisfaction from doing that and growing and coaching. And I'm sure there'll be loads of places where that's still valuable. So assume that at least half of what I've said is wrong in the same basis that half of the things I've probably ever shipped are not correct. [01:16:47] S1: That's why I love these conversations, and why I think this work that we do together is important is we are living through the wildest time in our careers. So much is changing. So much is being rethought, as you've described. And it feels like the only way we can make our way through this successfully is to learn from how other people are approaching it, see what they've learned, see what has not worked. [01:17:07] S0: Take bits that resonate, ignore the bits that seem bombastic or not applicable.
01:17:07 · Tom Verrilli, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:17:07] S0: Take bits that resonate, ignore the bits that seem bombastic or not applicable. [01:17:12] S1: Exactly. Because no one knows exactly where... Elizabeth Stone had this great way of putting it. There's a storming phase and the norming phase, and we're in the storming phase of holy shit. I remember in my PM career, as I started writing and stuff, everyone's always asking me, "How has product management changed over the last decade?" I'm like, "It hasn't changed. It's the same basically." But it feels like now it actually has significantly changed, which feels weird. [01:17:35] S0: Although to your point earlier, actually the core things- [01:17:37] S1: And also not. [01:17:38] S0: ... will all be the same. [01:17:39] S1: Yeah. Yeah. So that's why these are so useful just for people to see here's how a team is operating and what they've learned, and here's things to try and it may not work for you. But this is how we learn from each other. With that, we have reached a very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. All right, here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?