Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:21:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:21:58] S1: Oh, man. I'm loving this list already. This is great. To your point, it may still be worth doing if you're coming into it eyes wide open. This isn't gonna drive growth, but we're setting ourselves up for a future brand that's world class and we know our current brand stinks and our homepage needs to be refreshed. We're just... If you're aware it's not gonna drive growth, it might be okay? [00:22:18] S0: I mean, every single time I've seen a marketing site at least rebrand, it's been a step back performance that then is being treated as a fire drill to fix. Don't don't... Just don't do it. If if you expect, like, immediate results out of it or at least educate the team on how long it's gonna take to get to the point where you think that there's gonna be upside from your... Away from your original brand. [00:22:47] S1: So I've experienced this not just with marketing sites, but like most redesigns. Redesign of the product, redesign of [00:22:54] S0: blogboard. Yeah. How much how much product and engineering work comes into, like, just changing a logo in your in your product or changing colors? It's insane with no results ever. There's no results. [00:23:06] S1: And to your point, it's like, okay. Well, we've spent six months redoing onboarding everything we've built... Builds on this new design and experience. So we can't not launch it because it's... Every team is working on this new world. So we're just gonna launch it and then we're gonna claw back. We're gonna figure out how to get it back. Right? That's
00:23:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:23:06] S1: And to your point, it's like, okay. Well, we've spent six months redoing onboarding everything we've built... Builds on this new design and experience. So we can't not launch it because it's... Every team is working on this new world. So we're just gonna launch it and then we're gonna claw back. We're gonna figure out how to get it back. Right? That's [00:23:23] S0: how it goes. It's It's a new starting point and that starting point is gonna be much lower than your current optimized experience that you have. Whether it's well optimized or not optimized, it doesn't matter. It's gone through some level of optimization versus rebrand is always a shot in the dark. It might be prettier, sure, but that doesn't mean it's gonna perform well. So obviously never say never. Sometimes it might work and if it worked for you, I am so glad, but that's an outlier and don't treat it as a pattern. [00:23:57] S1: Yeah. And I was just gonna say, think everyone listening to this that is working on something like this is probably thinking, no. I think we have a good shot at this. It's... We've really thought deeply about this and it might actually be really positive in your experience. It's like... It sounds like you've seen it work, like, in occasionally, or is it just never?
00:23:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:23:57] S1: Yeah. And I was just gonna say, think everyone listening to this that is working on something like this is probably thinking, no. I think we have a good shot at this. It's... We've really thought deeply about this and it might actually be really positive in your experience. It's like... It sounds like you've seen it work, like, in occasionally, or is it just never? [00:24:14] S0: The best I've ever seen is that it produced net neutral results, and it produced us better ability to optimize towards something bigger. That's the best case scenario. So, if you're working on it, my biggest advice is not to say you stop. Just understand that the goal here is not to drive at launch in the seven day readout after launch some increased performance. The goal here should be we will launch, we will probably see a hit, model out and forecast for a hit, and then give yourself two to three months at the minimum, ideally more like six months to really optimize it back to a good standing where it can potentially outperform. But you need to bake in that three to six months of work after the launch, which is what a lot of companies and teams forget to do because they just move on because it's like big initiative, big pop, and off we go to our next project. [00:25:07] S1: I love that we're only at number three. This is amazing. Let's do number four.
00:25:12 · Elena Verna
[00:25:12] S0: Okay. Number four, is, obsessing over your competition. Okay. So there's a bit... A little bit of a gotcha here. I tear down companies all the time. I have thousands of Gmail accounts that I sign up for any and every product. I go through their entire experience. I look at their monetization strategies. I look at their activation. I do it across direct competition of the company that I'm working with as well. I know, I want to know what I'm playing against. So, knowing what your competition is doing is extremely important. Being inspired by some aspects of what your competition is doing in their experience is a wonderful place to originate an ideation or potentially try to implement into your product as well. But blatantly saying, Hey, we're going to copy all of these best tactics or all of these flows because, Hey, they're doing better than us. Let's just rip them and do exactly the same. Why isn't our onboarding looks the same as this onboarding? This company is so successful. That's where things really go wrong. Because every single experience is very unique to their customer, to their channel. You don't even know if you're getting their actual experience or you use some tester cell, or you're getting some personalized thing based on where you signed up from, of who you said that you are. So you don't even know what actually the overall thing looks like most of the time. And putting that into your product just leads to very subpar results. And there's a lot of drive, especially like to have it as a shortcut. Okay, we don't want to go through the sort of ideation or user research. We don't want to do user interviews, but we don't want to do AB testing. It works for them. It must work for us. Let's just like go and do it. And it fails 95% of the time. Now, there are certain pieces that I would rightly recommend. I already said inspiration. Like, I use it for inspiration all the time. I'm like, okay, what's cool? What is everybody doing? So, because I wanna just stay in the know on what other people are implementing and hopefully if it's in their control experience, it works and it works better. I use web archives a ton for logged out pages too. I'm like, okay, how did it look last year? Why does their homepage look this way or the pricing page? And I analyze that and I try to extrapolate some results.
00:27:37 · Elena Verna
I also think that there's a lot of patterns you start to notice as you start tearing down all of these companies. You're like, Oh, these elements are always the same. That means all of these companies are arriving to these things and they seem to be winning elements and you can take those elements and put them into your product, but you can never skip the ideation, the design, the user research, the customer interview, the experimentation step. And you should always balance it with actually innovating yourself in your product. Because copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocracy because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else. Leader is by default, is somebody that is able to separate themselves from the pack in something else. And if you are trying to just be, I don't know who is ever trying to be like the mediocre middle of the pack, but maybe it's a good starting point, but never the end goal. The only other thing that I'll say before I'll stop talking is benchmarks. Benchmarks are also very dangerous here to use because benchmarks are usually done on all of the competition and all of the softwares out there. And the way people define numbers is so different from company to company. Like, even if you look at something as simple as signups. Okay, how many signups should you be on average getting? Or like your conversion from prospecting visitor to a signup, or from a signup to activated user. It so depends on how do you define prospect visitor? Some companies define it as old traffic. Some define it as new traffic. Some of them define it on the new IP address, new persistent ID, how Google Analytics defines it, how Amplitude defines it. So, all of these definitions are so different. So, taking also any benchmark that is derived from competition and saying this is where we should be is also so dangerous because it might not even be applicable depending on how you defined the metric. And one of the things that all of those benchmarks benchmarking data fails is like to actually look at specific definitions. And that's not to say that benchmarks are not extremely valuable data point in your decision making, because it's an input that you should leverage to say what it could be possible, but to just blindly take it and set it is just a sure way to fail any of your initiatives and efforts.
00:30:04 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:30:04] S1: You're telling me that there's no shortcuts. [00:30:08] S0: I wish there were. I mean, I've been doing this for over fifteen years. If there were any shortcuts, I'd be all over them. There are patterns and there are frameworks, but there's no shortcuts. [00:30:20] S1: So people hearing this, they're like, okay. Don't copy the competition. Use it for inspiration. It's a little hard to know exactly the line between those two. Is there an example that you can think of where you took really interesting inspiration from someone and it worked for a company you're working with? Or you copied someone and it's just like, oh, that failed. That was a bad idea.