Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:42:37 · Nikita Bier
[00:42:37] S0: It's hard to really, verbalize some of the re... Like, the, the things that motivate us as people. And I, I had, like, a pretty there... There's a tweet I put out that's kind of dogmatic in terms of like how how I view why people download apps. And it's like... It's very simple. It's like people download apps to make or save money. Examples of that might be, like, you know, WhatsApp where, you know, free texting. And then the other reason is to find a mate. So maybe, like, Tinder or Snapchat, find love. And the third is to unplug from reality, maybe, like, Netflix or Fortnite. There's a bunch of other kind of subcategories that are very utilitarian, like movement, you know, Uber or Airbnb, like, you know, shelter. And so I think putting that in a framing document and the particular nuanced reason, why people are gonna adopt is is difficult, as... When you're presenting that to, you know, people that are, you know, seasoned professionals and care about how something might reflect on them personally. And so that's really difficult inside of a large company. You'd certainly have distribution advantages. If you want to just inject your app into one of the parent apps and get density within a community, you could do that. But that that part, I think, is probably solvable for a startup, if you just want to pay for ads or... Like, getting your app into a dense friend graph is is overall trivial. Like, you you... As a founder, you should be able to pull it off after enough tries. So that advantage that a big company brings, I mean, it's... It makes it easier, but, it's not not something that I think, is something that a founder can't solve for themselves.
00:44:37 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[00:44:37] S1: So an interesting takeaway, it sounds like, is many people feel like, I'm gonna build a social app. They probably often hear it. Facebook's gonna do that. Instagram's gonna copy you. Snap's gonna do that. And what I'm hearing here is it's not as easy as many people think, that it might be actually a lot harder for them to try something. [00:44:53] S0: It's not only harder for them to, identify these opportunities and to verbalize it internally, and align the company around it. It's it's also hard to respond to signals in the market. A lot of people think, like, these incumbents are gonna steal your ideas. And for the most part, it takes a pretty long time for them to respond to even the number one app or, charting in the... Because it'll start charting in the App Store. You know, a PM will make a post about it, and then, the the market's strategy or market research team might do a study to follow-up on it. And it'll kinda float around for a few months. They they might, put together a framing deck saying, hey. We should go after this opportunity. Let's put together this team. It'll go through VP reviews, and then, it'll start development. Development might take six to twelve months. Realistically, I think most companies, large companies take, like, twelve to twenty four months to respond to competitive threats in the market. [00:46:03] S1: Do you think this is solvable? Is there something a company can change to get better at this? Are there companies that are good at this in your experience, or is this just as you grow, this is just what happens?
00:46:12 · Nikita Bier
[00:46:12] S0: The incentives within large companies make this very difficult because you don't wanna present something that you have a hunch about being a good idea. Because if there's not market signals already, then it's hard to defend. And people in companies are focused on getting their, you know, yearly bonus or their, you know, they're they're focused on their performance reviews. And, it's hard to show up into a a framing meeting saying, like... And framing meeting is like a meeting where you, you know, you position... You're you're positioning the opportunity and everything. Here's what we should go after. It's hard to slide... Just say, okay. By first principles, this is a good idea, and here's some, like, very vague market signals. In reality, you need to walk in and say, here is the number one app in The United States, and we don't we don't own it. And if you present something like that, that's pretty defensible on a... If you fail, because there was market evident. But if you fail about something that's more based on kind of vague abstract... So you you have to generally... Like, the only path is to kind of copy existing companies, existing products if if you wanna really get momentum, inside inside of a large organization. And for new... Completely new concepts, it's, I think, very difficult to present a lot of those ideas, either to verbalize them in... Into a document or to even get... Rally, the organization around it.
00:47:42 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:47:42] S1: That's a really interesting insight. This episode is brought to you by Explo, a game changer for customer facing analytics and data reporting. Are your users craving more dashboards, reports, and analytics within your product? Are you tired of trying to build it yourself? As a product leader, you probably have these requests in your roadmap, but the struggle to prioritize them is real. Building analytics from scratch can be time consuming, expensive, and a really challenging process. Enter Explo. Explo is a fully white labeled embedded analytics solution designed entirely with your user in mind. Getting started is easy. Explo connects to any relational database or warehouse, and with its low code functionality, you can build and style dashboards in minutes. Once you're ready, simply embed the dashboard or report into your application with a tiny code snippet. The best part? Your end users can use Explo's AI features for their own report and dashboard generation, eliminating customer data requests for your support team. Build and embed a fully white labeled analytics experience in days. Try it for free at xplo.co/lenny. That's explo.co/lenny. Before we move on to the next chapter, I wanna come back to the very first thing you said where product management is not real. Is there anything else that you can say about your insight there, or is it basically what you described where PMs aren't actually involved in design and and company like Facebook in your experience?
00:49:13 · Nikita Bier
[00:49:13] S0: The the functional organization structure of big tech has kind of separated product managers from the product development process in many ways. They're not looking at data because data scientists are doing that. They're just parsing some of the reports that they get back. They're mainly just writing documents and then kind of being the team secretary and running around getting approvals for, from each, cross functional team, legal, privacy, everything like that. And, yeah, it's... You're act... You're actually very much separated from the product itself. And and so I I think, like, what Snapchat has done, and I think Apple too to to the same extent, is that designers run the show. And I think that's led to some very novel products coming out from both of those companies. But, I mean, that that has its own host of problems. Because actually rolling out a product inside of a large organization, it it requires a sheer force of will because it's a lot of work. I mean, there's a lot of regulatory scrutiny, you know, scaling it up. Like, there's... You do need someone to to project manage. And so I I don't know if it's... The silver bullet is to give designers the rain to to control... To run the show, but I also don't think the the current... The the the traditional, like, Google Facebook style of being team secretaries is also the best solution.
00:50:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[00:50:44] S1: To defend product managers, I think many product managers spend a lot of time in design, spend a lot of time with data science. I think probably what you saw is, like, the extreme big, big, big tech version of product management. I know even PMs at Facebook can, if they want to spend time with design. I think it's just obviously very different from a startup world where you're just... That's all you're doing. [00:51:05] S0: Yeah. It's certainly an exaggerated view, but it's particularly relevant, I think, for all the zero to one initiatives. Because, like, if you're if you're a product manager on a standalone app inside of a large... Like, you should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything. Like... And then, yeah, it should be cleaned up, prototyped by a a technical designer. But that's your idea, and products live and die in the pixels, like consumer products. So that... That's that's on you. And that's that's where I think... For maybe larger growth initiatives, yes, you can have, you can... Could be a little more detached from the pixels. [00:51:43] S1: I love that advice. Okay. Before we move on to the next phase of your journey of starting Gas, I heard there's an interesting story around where you were actually put within the Facebook office, physically, where your team was put. Is that is that... Is there something there?