Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:30:40 · Elena Verna
[00:30:40] S0: I use competition to understand the general framework of how people collect some information or resolve certain steps. So, for example, sharing model. So many products like, Hey, can you share this with somebody? Well, you can go and spend so much time of like figuring out how it should look, or you can go to Slack, you can go to Figma, you can go to Miro, you can go to Notion, like, okay, Google, and like, how are they doing sharing model? You can look at all of that and say, okay, here's the all common elements that all of them have. Here's the pieces that I think will apply to my product. Here's things that do not, and here's what I can derive from it. I use it as an input into ideation, but I never use it as a destination for the result, if that makes sense. Because it's very helpful to not start from scratch. The empty start problem is real, and competition is a wonderful way to not have that and to have input into it, but never to just say, Oh, we can skip the design cycle, off we go. Or just like slap our collars on it. If it works for them, it's going to work for us. So I have extensive Miro boards with everybody's onboarding flows, with everybody's pricing pages, their sharing model, their invite colleagues models that I reference all the time. But there have never been the exact thing that I would use for any company as opposed to say, Hey, I think this is a great starting point for you. Here are the things that I think will work very well for your company and for your product. And take these elements, the rest you need to go and do themselves. So at least that way there is a starting point. And this is why I also started doing a lot more of like my own almost prototypes, like skeletons of here's the elements that you should do in these flows. Like I have one for pricing page, I have one for homepage, but you need to put in your own umph into it in order for it to actually work.
00:32:38 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:32:38] S1: What made me realize this back in the day was thinking... At Airbnb especially, thinking about people looking at our flow and being like, this is... They've got it all figured out. We're just gonna copy what they've done because they're so thoughtful and have tested everything. And knowing how that has not happened and how so much of this was guesswork and we hate so much of it, just thinking about people trying to copy this, thinking we know what we're doing, it's like, what are you guys even thinking? [00:33:02] S0: Oh my god. I actually had that happen to me at Dropbox not so long ago. Somebody reached out and they're like, oh, I'm like... It was like some page in activation flow. They're like, oh, I love this page. This is so cool. I I love what you've done here. Like, I'm gonna go take it to my company. I'm like, I I I went... We haven't touched it in ten years. Like, this this page is, like, only visible for, like, small cohort of people. Like, please don't do it. Like, please don't copy it. Like, it performs like shit. I know it's out there, but it's not meant to be out there. Nobody, like, thoughtfully put it out there. So, like, that's definitely a huge a huge failure point that you can run into. [00:33:42] S1: Right. If it's like a fancy company, you assume they're just so smart and diligent about every little pixel and decision. [00:33:48] S0: Woah. If people only knew of how much craziness is happening in those big companies and how much chaos there is. [00:33:56] S1: Oh, man. That's a whole other podcast episode.
00:33:56 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[00:33:56] S1: Oh, man. That's a whole other podcast episode. [00:33:58] S0: Whole other podcast. Yes. [00:34:00] S1: Okay. Number five.
00:34:02 · Elena Verna
[00:34:02] S0: Okay. I have this one. It's a little bit meta, but I see it happening all the time. We love to think that our problems are unique. Like, I'm working in this company and like we have this growth problem and we need to go and figure out the solution from the grounds up. Maybe this is like a little bit related to the competition point, but I'm very sorry to break it to all of you, but your problem is not unique. I am 99% sure of that. Your problem has been felt by somebody somewhere in probably many, many places. And you trying to reengineer solution is time lost to market and has a huge opportunity cost. So my biggest thing that I try to get people is like, don't Don't think that you have unique problems. You don't. I know we love to. Like, it would be fun to have something unique to learn. But with so many startups, with so many people in our industry, in your industry, whichever industry that is, your problem has been solved by somebody, or at least that there's a lot of failures on the problem that you should be learning from. And number one thing that whenever you have an initiative or whenever you have a metric that you need to go and move, do not start from scratch, ever. Do not start from scratch. It's like the worst thing that you can do because you're going to waste so many cycles on trying to do something that probably has already been solved. So, which means like, how do you approach this as a result? Well, you can look at competition and how they're solving the problem. That's one input, for sure. You should go find people that have solved this problem because there are people there and people love to talk about what they do. So, take advantage of that human psychology and go find those people and just ask them, How did you do it? What did you do? What happened? Obviously, not all the time everybody's going to respond, but we have LinkedIn, we have X. Go out there, find the people that you think or ask around in your network of who you think might have similar solutions and just go talk to people. It would be an incredible shortcut. Like if you're talking about an actual hack, that is a hack to get to an optimal solution. And then the last thing that I would also say is that solving any one problem uniquely is extremely inefficient. We are evolving so fast in our market. You need to be able to patternize your solutions.
00:36:41 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
Patternize, is that a word? Make patterns. Make patterns out of your solutions. So more you can stop looking at it as a unique data point or unique problem and more as there is, I need to fit it into existing pattern or I need to figure out the framework on how to solve not only this problem, but other problems, the faster you'll be able to get at least to like 60% of the solution there. And then you can do very authentic implementation of whatever you want to do. But to go from zero to 60 manually as a one off, we do not have time in the industry right now to do it unless you wanna be left behind. [00:37:22] S1: Bam. Powerful words. Is there is there an example that comes to mind of you doing this either the wrong way of just like thinking this was unique and realizing I should have talked to people or where you actually realized something was not unique enough?
00:37:36 · Elena Verna
[00:37:36] S0: I'll give you actually an example that I had when I was at Miro. At Miro, we were first trying to stand up community. And I was tasked to do it, and I've never done it before. So I'm like, I was banging my head around, like against the wall, and I'm like, Okay, how do I do it? Like, what software do we use? Where do we acquire users? Like, what kind of content is going to go in there? So, I was like approaching it almost like a finding like product market fit. And then like, I will fail so much doing it. And I honestly only have a year to get to some sort of traction before this is going to get shut down because company is impatient, company is moving fast. So if this is going to be a failure point, it's either going to be taken away from me, which is fair, or we're just going to close the door on it, which would be a huge failure, both on my point and for company as a whole. So, I went and I started talking to a bunch of people that have done communities. And I remember talking to Carol Wong from Atlassian, who has the Sudok community. I actually hired her as an advisor afterwards. She's like, Well, are you talking about a user community or an agency or a partner community? And I'm like, my mind was blown. I'm like, I wasn't even considering all of these angles because I was just literally thinking about users only. And she's like, well, you shouldn't necessarily start with a user community. If you want some results out of it, go to agency or partner communities first. She would outline it to me in the structural ways for me to like grasp my head around it and then implement something that had much better results at the end that I wouldn't even gotten to probably until six, eight months later if I didn't talk to her. So I think it has to come with a place of knowing that you don't know everything and humility to say, Hey, I need help. And I might have an already fancy title. At that point, I was an interim CMO at Miro. I'm like, don't know how to do this. And it actually earns you a lot more credit than you think. And a lot of people are afraid to admit that they don't know how to solve a problem, and that's why they start from scratch. But you need to really put your ego aside and get some help faster than trying to hit every single failure point along the way.