Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:55:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[00:55:34] S1: Yeah. And I think what you may also be saying here, which I think is really, really important, is that because it's so easy to build, people can just build all these features and additions and the value accrues to build something awesome and the product mind becomes more important to help push this stuff from just a sloppy every feature, every checkbox to something awesome that people actually use. [00:55:59] S0: Right. Because at the end of the day, if you're building it for yourself, whatever, go have fun. But if you're going to build it and you want to sell it and you only need three key features to sell it to someone, like it's going to have to be boiled down. It's going to have to be figured out because you're still selling it to a human who needs to understand it. Now, do you think you could vibe code Flighty? [00:56:22] S1: Probably. [00:56:23] S0: Maybe now that Flighty exists, you could. [00:56:25] S1: Copy this. [00:56:26] S0: Like you could do version two of Flighty, maybe vibe coded because you say, look at Flighty. But the original Flighty, to me, that's luxury software, right? It was understood, how the pixels are done. So you got to remember, is it version one or is it version two, three, four? Because an opinion-based thing on highly innovative differentiated stuff, it doesn't have a model for that. There's not that stuff in there. You still need the version one to be done and maybe you can prototype with these things. So I just, I could go on for hours, but whatever, that's just one old guy's point of view.
00:56:26 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:56:26] S0: Like you could do version two of Flighty, maybe vibe coded because you say, look at Flighty. But the original Flighty, to me, that's luxury software, right? It was understood, how the pixels are done. So you got to remember, is it version one or is it version two, three, four? Because an opinion-based thing on highly innovative differentiated stuff, it doesn't have a model for that. There's not that stuff in there. You still need the version one to be done and maybe you can prototype with these things. So I just, I could go on for hours, but whatever, that's just one old guy's point of view. [00:57:03] S1: I think it's really important, this insight that as it becomes easier to build, the things that stand out are the things that are really well thought through, and great, and luxury almost as you described. [00:57:15] S0: And you can feel it, right? And you go, oh my God. And I'm like one of the biggest proponents of... I'm like telling, Flighty, Flighty, because all the people in my sphere, they're all flying all time. I'm like, "Have you tried it? Have you tried? So insane?" And then you get the word of mouth and things take off because there has been that level of care and craft to it. And yeah, maybe a lot of the sub-functions of Flighty could be built and whatever from Claude Code or whatever, but the whole thing and the architecture and everything, I don't think so. [00:57:50] S1: And if someone hasn't tried Flighty, clearly downloaded and play with it. [00:57:54] S0: Yeah. Yeah.
00:57:54 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:57:54] S0: Yeah. Yeah. [00:57:54] S1: I love that this is the example of an amazing product. That's a really cool thing- [00:57:58] S0: Yeah, and it's all software. It's all software. [00:58:00] S1: Yeah. Something along these lines, as people hear you talk, clearly you are an amazing storyteller and in your book, you often come back to the power of storytelling, the value of storytelling for product builders. I guess one is just: why is that so important, do you think? And two, is what's one tip you could give people to get better at storytelling?
00:58:19 · Tony Fadell
[00:58:19] S0: Storytelling, that's how we've passed information down or got people to commit to doing something. Stories are so who we are. We go to the movies for stories. We have books, we have all this stuff. And it's just so essential to who we are because we like to be taken on a journey. And hopefully when you're buying a product or licensing one or whatever it is, you're subscribing, you're taken on a journey that meets your expectations or is better than what the expectations were set, it's outsized that. And so Dave Chappelle is, when it comes to comedy and storytelling, the way he weaves it, he can weave a story for 20 minutes to get to the punchline and you're just in it, right? I just love his comedy as opposed to the punchline guys who are just, or excuse me, the short ones. It's something in our nature, human nature. We were told stories when we were a kid, we read the same or watched the same movies 100 times when we were kids. There's something about being taken on that journey that we love, and people love to be educated that way. Right. Your best college professors, high school teachers, whatever, they taught you why you should love certain math or certain physics or whatever and took you on a journey of why it mattered and then you're like, "Oh, now I get it." You can learn all the basics of how to do something, but that doesn't really tie it into something that's meaningful. And so when you tie it to something that's human, right, that's when it becomes and accessible for humans and it's relatable, that's when it goes and it can be for anything. And that's when great marketing, great sales happens. And great story telling through the product design, that's even better, right? Because it wasn't just perfuming this pig and you put some on this bad product and you say, "Oh yeah, try it. Oh, yeah." And you're like, "Oh, and then it doesn't meet the expectations." But when it sings from the depths of the product, like you were bringing up with the Nest Protect, the smoke detector and stuff. When we had all that and that you could feel the love and care, that's when people go, "Oh, I love this and I want more from that brand, or from that company, or that team." That's what they want. And so to get better at it, I've learned it because I watched my dad, he was in sales, right?
01:00:49 · Tony Fadell
So I watched how he would sell Levi's and I would watch and he would be like, and he wasn't always selling to sell. Sometimes he was convincing them not to buy something because that wasn't the best product they had. "Buy this one instead. And actually go to my competitor down the street," because he was building a relationship in storytelling because these people loved what it was. So it sometimes is not just setting expectations and telling a story, but it's also saying, "Hey, maybe I'm not for you." And that's truth. That's also truth. And so like Steve always said, "The best marketing just tells the truth." Now might put nice words around it, nice creative and everything, but it's telling the truth. And so when I watched Steve prepare for, and like I said, when we did the two and a half years with the iPhone, he was honing the story of the iPhone every day. He didn't give it to marketing. He knew what that thing was and what those key features were like we talked about and micromanage those features because he knew those were the things the world's going to take notice to. And he would refine the story and then tell other people who were unwashed by it, like friends who were really smart and say, "I'm going to give you the pitch and give you the pitch." And he would refine, refine, refine. And so when you saw him come on stage, it was just because he had done it 100,000 times or at least 10,000 times, right? And he knew it like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, it just came off. And so I watched and I learned from that and that's what we did for like the Nest Learning Thermostat. That's what we did for each of those things. It was just that same storytelling over and over, why does it matter? Why does it matter? And because too many times when we're technology led, we talk about the what. We don't talk about the why. And the why is where the storytelling is because you want to take a journey of why it matters to you. If you're talking about the what, you're just talking to another geek. Love geeks, no problem. I'm one of them. And we can relate on that level, but general, most people who are not in the technology world, they want a story and they want something that touches them in some way.
01:03:14 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:14] S1: One lesson I'm hearing from what you just described is telling the story over and over and over and refining it over time is where the best stuff comes from, not just here, I just came up with this and it's going to be amazing.