Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:00:44 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:00:44] S0: Mhmm. Yes. [01:00:45] S1: And then that worksheet is in this post that you wrote. That way, you know, point to. Is that right? [01:00:49] S0: Correct. Correct. [01:00:49] S1: Amazing. Okay. Great. This is very practical advice. I love it. Okay. One last question before a very exciting lightning round. You worked at Bridgewater Associates, which I didn't know until I started digging into your into your past. That sounds creepy. And, Bridgewater Associates famous for what, Ray Dalio's hedge fund, author of Principles and all these other incredible books. And it's a very unique working environment, so I just wanted to ask about your experience there. Specifically, one of the craziest things there is just this thing called DOTS, I think it's called, where people just call out mistakes that people make at the company and it's public. Is that how it actually was? Any memories of that? [01:01:27] S0: Yeah. Yeah. I was a senior management, what's called an SMA, which is the management layer right under Ray's team. And we were the priests of of the of the church of Bridgewater. Bridgewater did things like record... This is public college. I'm not saying anything. [01:01:50] S1: Yeah. You record
01:01:51 · Oji Udezue
[01:01:51] S0: every meeting. Eventually, we created a Dot Collector, which is... Allows you to rate people in real time. So I'm just having a conversation with you. And before the meeting closes, in front of each other, I pull up my laptop and I rate you and rate the interaction. And, you know, in theory, the idea is that if you constantly rate people across hundreds of interactions, then you build a picture of them that is fairly accurate, statistically accurate, that will transcend, you know, maybe, like, emotional relation, besides wisdom of the crowd idea. So that's a theory. In practice, it is emotionally, like, exhausting. And like you said, the little creepy, even the recording. So I think there were things about Bridgewater that I didn't... That I understood intellectually in terms of the purpose that Ray had designed, but didn't quite work. It's like the way I think about this is the theory of the principles are really good. The practice can be quite... And the execution can be quite off and not very human or not very empathetic. But I will say this. Bridgewater taught me things that I don't think any other organization in the world have taught me. Like, one example is Bridgewater thinks of people in three dimensions, their skills, their attributes, their values. Most organizations think about people in terms of just their skills. But it makes sense that people have attributes and values. Right? That people are, you know, timid. People are bold. People like to jump in. People like to stand back. And, you know, all those other things we think about personality and proclivity. Bridgewater tries to establish and measure them and also tries to write job descriptions that say this is the kind of attributes we're looking for, not just the skills we're looking for. And then, of course, values like, you know, are you a thief or are you a principled and so on and so forth. Now that idea of looking at talent or people in general, both in your professional life and in your personal life is a huge addition to me as a professional from Bridgewater. So I am not by any means saying... I'm saying that there were things I didn't enjoy about Bridgewater, things that I learned that I would learn... I've learned nowhere else as well.
01:04:18 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[01:04:18] S1: Did you take that to what you do today thinking of people in those three different ways and [01:04:23] S0: 100%. [01:04:23] S1: Something like that? [01:04:24] S0: You did? In my in my professional life, in my personal life, when I interview people, I am cognizant of those three things, and I try to extract those three things because I think it improves your success. You know, famously, like, all the weird skill based interviewing at Google was only 50, you know, fiftyfifty predictive. And the reason is Google did not consider the other two things, I believe. Right? You know, Bridgewater was willing to endure 80% attrition to arrive at the best people. Now I don't think it works for them because some of their system was not empathetic of humans, like expecting humans to be computers. But I thought that was a very important insight. Awesome. [01:05:09] S1: Oji, is there anything else that you want to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
01:05:09 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[01:05:09] S1: Oji, is there anything else that you want to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round? [01:05:14] S0: In the history of product development, we have basically started to create abstraction to guide our work, right, versus wild, wild, wild west. So the engineers came up with agile and pair programming and all these things. The designers have come up with, you know, design thinking, design sprints, and combined with research to talk about how to do discovery of various complexity. And the question is, the product abstractions, because there's code, there's product, there's business. So the product and business layer, what is our abstraction? What is our crucible for organizing our work? We don't even have one. We don't have a name for it. And so the idea of a part system is that there's an abstraction above agile and design thinking that we have to pay attention to how to build solid organizations and to execute well at the product and the business layer. This is a co creative framework with me and Ezine. And the idea here is how do you construct a good product system? And literally, could boil it down into a checklist of the systems you need to build to build a really good cohesive r and d organization. So I think that's the tee up. I'm gonna have to leave you thirsty because someone else is probably gonna go deep into it. [01:06:35] S1: Amazing. And that's your wife that you mentioned who you are cocreating this framework with and who we're gonna have on the podcast in the future. [01:06:39] S0: That's right.
01:06:39 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:06:39] S0: That's right. [01:06:41] S1: What is it like being married to another product leader would you recommend? [01:06:45] S0: A 100%. You're have really, really productive conversations, and you can you can redesign other companies' applications in one conversation in the evening. [01:06:57] S1: Amazing. Well, that was, almost the lightning round question, but I moved it up earlier. And so with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? [01:07:06] S0: Yeah. I'm ready. Let's do it. [01:07:07] S1: Okay. Great. Let's do it. What what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?
01:07:07 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[01:07:07] S1: Okay. Great. Let's do it. What what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? [01:07:13] S0: There's one business book that I recommend. I think it's called The Halo Effect. It's basically a book that lets you call bullshit on all these business books that are... Tell you all kinds of stupid shit. It is how to deconstruct what is important in a business and self help book and what is not important and what is just circumstantial storytelling with random facts and form fitting evidence. It's called the Halo Effect. Read it. Why do you need to read it? Because garbage in, garbage out. You know, people were amazed at the outlier effect Malcolm Gladwell, and then people have been tearing it down for fifteen years now. But everyone ingested it and and thought it was the most important thing. But how do you how do you know what's important to take away from it and what's not? The Halo Effect will help you. And then the other thing is I read for pleasure because I read a lot for work. And so science fiction is the thing. There's lots to recommend, but I would say that people should either read Dune, Frank Herbert, or Foundation by Asimov. If you haven't read those two things and you're a science fiction, person, you really should. The world building is incredible. It's not... You know, I understand Tolkien and fantasy, but the science fiction side of it is those two books. [01:08:31] S1: There's also a TV series of Foundation now, which I can't say recommend absolutely, but, it's it's a beautiful show.