Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:51:43 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[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? [00:51:57] S0: Yeah. So our our our team was actually, when we joined the new product experimentation group, we were actually seated, I think, like, at this... Basically the same desk as, Mark Zuckerberg. Mhmm. And that that was pretty cool, to see, you know, how the how the machine runs, like, from the, from Zuck's view. But we we had a few artifacts that we had kept with us from our old office, when we were running, TBH. And one of them was this, this kind of pop art painting that I bought on the street when I needed to get something on the walls for our office, and it was this giant painting of Tim Cook. We had been carrying it between our orgs at at Facebook just because it was a funny painting. And I I kind of got it because, like, it was kind of symbolic of who actually controls our destiny is, is Apple. And, so when we relocated to, the area where Zuck was sitting, I I put up the painting on the wall, and it was basically a giant painting of Tim Cook was overlooking Zuck. And eventually, one of the, EAs, there said, actually, do you think you could take that home? And it kinda made sense because the, you can't really have a painting of a... Of another big tech executive overlooking us. What does it [00:53:21] S1: look like? Do you happen to have it?
00:53:21 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier
[00:53:21] S1: look like? Do you happen to have it? [00:53:22] S0: Yeah. I I actually I actually do. Let me let me let me go grab it. [00:53:25] S1: Amazing. Oh, wow. That's that's artistic. So that's Tim Cook. What is the idea there that he's peeking through this darkness staring at you? [00:53:36] S0: Yeah. Yeah. He's he's the real boss of all of us. [00:53:41] S1: I could see I could see why I suck. Would not want that staring at [00:53:45] S0: you all. That's amazing. [00:53:47] S1: And I like that you still have that with you. [00:53:49] S0: Yeah. One one of the artifacts of, that of that chapter of life. So good. [00:53:54] S1: Okay. So so that was your Facebook journey those four years. That's wild. You left Facebook. At some point, you started... I just... I remember this. You started tweeting like, hey. I'm working on a new app. Everyone was going nuts. So what's he working on? And at this point, I I think you probably in your mind thought, hey. I'm this one hit wonder. I haven't shown that I can do this again and again. And so I think you probably have this motivation. Maybe talk about that just like this drive of, like, hey. I wanna do this again. Is that where your mind was at?