Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:18:20 · Evan Spiegel
[00:18:20] S1: The best sort of academic overview or summary I think comes from a guy, Safi Bahcall, who wrote a book called Loonshots. It's really worth reading. It's all about the innovation process. And actually when I read it, I was like, "Oh my gosh, that kind of explains a lot of how we think about innovation at Snap." And I think to summarize the academic version, we can talk about what we've developed and built at Snap, but to summarize, essentially his findings are that basically if you want to deliver a product at scale, you usually need quite a large organization. A large organization needs hierarchy and structure, a lot of operational rigor. And as soon as you have an organization that's very large and very structured like that, people become very focused on getting a promotion, getting into the next step of the hierarchy. And that means that all of a sudden they become a lot more risk averse. They're not really as willing to try new things. They're very focused on achieving the goals that have sort of been set for them in this operational hierarchy, and that makes it very, very challenging to innovate. Now on the flip side, structures that are really healthy and constructive for innovation typically are very, very flat. That's the same for our design team, for example, where there's no one that has a fancier title or a role. There's a lot of flexibility in terms of the ability to try new things and fail quickly and put up crazy ideas. And what he basically finds is that the companies that are very successful actually have both types of organizations inside their company and that the leaders of the organization are the ones who are responsible for creating a healthy functioning relationship between the two types of organizations. Because what ends up happening in a lot of companies is that the small innovative team becomes critical of the large organization, oh, they're so bureaucratic and slow, they don't innovate, things like that. And then the larger organization is like, "Oh, what are these Jokers doing?" Just innovating, they're not really driving the business, they're not supporting our customers. And so a lot of tension actually arises from the different organizational structures.
00:20:24 · Evan Spiegel
And so the leadership responsibility, and I think Safi does a really good job looking throughout history, what leaders have cultivated really constructive and powerful relationships between the more innovative or flat parts of the organization and the more structured and hierarchical parts of the organization, how you create that mutual respect, how you create that dialogue between those parts of the organization is so important. And so when I read that, I was like, wow, that actually sounds quite similar to what we have at Snap. We have to run a large public company, serve almost a billion customers. That means our service needs to be really reliable and it means that we need to operate really, really effectively to serve our customers. And at the same time, we have a very, very small ... It sort of oscillates between like nine and 12 people design team that is constantly innovating and creating new things. And I think the beauty of what I love about Snap is that the dialogue between those two teams is where a lot of that innovation happens because a lot of our engineers working to serve our customers or working on reliability have a bunch of great ideas and so do our designers. And as long as they're in dialogue, really great things can happen.
00:21:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Evan Spiegel
[00:21:35] S0: There's someone, I forget who this was, but they described this approach as the fast thinking and slow thinking part of the organization, kind of like Kahneman's System 1, System 2 approach. It's interesting, the fast moving, let's say. What do you kind of call this innovation team or do you have a label for this like, let's come up with the new ideas part of the org? [00:21:55] S1: Well, I think it's really important to acknowledge that new ideas come from everywhere and we want that. But I think the design team in particular, it's really important, and we call it the design team, it's really important that they have a flat non-hierarchical structure where new ideas can come from anywhere. I mean, I think that that is absolutely critical. [00:22:13] S0: So in terms of how you operationalize this, is that the key to the innovation you've seen as this specific small design team who can work? Talk about just how you actually operationalize this sort of way of working.
00:22:26 · Evan Spiegel
[00:22:26] S1: Yeah. I mean, I think it's an important part of it, but a lot of how we built Snap was modeled actually on mine and Bobby's original relationship, right? Where Bobby has a computer science, heavy duty computer science and stats background, mathematical and computational science, but he really likes design and likes thinking about building things for customers and empathizing with them. I have a design background, right? I was in the product design program back at school, which actually was part of the mechanical engineering department at the time. I took some computer science classes, so I sort of knew what I was talking about when it came to computer science. So we both had mutual respect for each other and our skillsets and our backgrounds and both enjoyed talking together about the types of products we wanted to create. And that dialogue created a lot of innovation. And so a lot of how we've thought about growing the company over time is like strengthening that dialogue between engineers and designers and creating an environment where folks feel comfortable throwing out really crazy ideas. But I think for the design team in particular, the thing that is probably most important is the velocity of design work. So I typically meet with our designers for a couple hours every week and we just look at work. I mean, new work every week, hundreds of ideas, I would guess, on a weekly basis that to me, if I think about where I learned how to design and build things, I have sort of an interesting combination because I went to Stanford for the product design program, which is really focused on empathy and this iterative process of understanding what people want and building prototypes and iterating, but really centered on empathy, human centered design. And then at the same time, I'd also been to art school. So I had studied at art center, I'd studied at Otis here in Los Angeles, both great art schools. And so I was used to this grinding expectation that you're making new work all the time and then just an absolutely brutal critique process on a regular basis.
00:24:27 · Evan Spiegel, Lenny Rachitsky
And so for me, as I thought about the parts of my education that I really liked, it was this combination of really developing empathy with people and the types of products that they want in their lives, but at the same time, having this really high velocity work ethic where you're not just like thinking all the time about new products, you're actually making stuff every week, all the time, and then you're talking about it as a team because that critique process is where so much of the learning sort of happens. So I would say that the velocity of work is really important because our favorite saying is, if you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas. That's really, really important. [00:25:09] S0: I just had Keith Rabois on the podcast. I don't know if you know this about his ... He has many contrarian takes. One is if you're building a consumer product, do not talk to customers. Not only is it not useful, his advice is, its harmful because it can infiltrate your subconscious and it just doesn't lead to great things. What's your perspective on that?
00:25:09 · Lenny Rachitsky, Evan Spiegel
[00:25:09] S0: I just had Keith Rabois on the podcast. I don't know if you know this about his ... He has many contrarian takes. One is if you're building a consumer product, do not talk to customers. Not only is it not useful, his advice is, its harmful because it can infiltrate your subconscious and it just doesn't lead to great things. What's your perspective on that? [00:25:28] S1: Wow, that's really interesting. I would say you have to talk to customers, you have to share your idea, you should share your idea as quickly as possible, as frequently as possible. It doesn't mean you need to take people's advice or feedback, but it's really important, I think, to listen. And I think for me, it's not like the survey model of listening. I don't think that's particularly helpful. But I think going deep and talking with someone for an hour, two hours about how do they use technology, how does it fit in their lives? How do they feel about the products they're using? You can learn so much. And I think customers are an endless source of inspiration when it comes to building products. [00:26:04] S0: So pro talking to users, because I feel like you've been really good at just like, here's what it'll be and here's how it should be. And even though people may not understand this is what it should be, I trust me it'll work really well. What's that balance of just like, here's what I'll pay attention to, here's what I won't.