Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:40:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna, Christina Gilbert
[00:40:00] S1: And the thing that'll really hurt your ego is failing. And so the more you could do to avoid failing and being successful with this initiative by talking to people, doing research. [00:40:11] S0: And it should be fair. Failure is going to be unavoidable. If you talk about growth, growth is about failure. My big motto, like life motto in growth is that you have to fail to learn. You can't just constantly succeed. Success is an output of a lot of failures. But the question is, how much time do you have to fail? And a lot of times we don't realize how many failure cycles we're going to have to go through before we get a success. And that company or even market has no time for that. And so still expect to fail, sure. But the timeline for failures is going to be shortened quite a [00:40:52] S1: bit. Okay. So we've gone halfway through your list. There's 10 items on this list, right? [00:40:58] S0: Yes. Yes. There's 10 items. Next one is a good one. [00:41:01] S1: I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina. [00:41:08] S2: Yes. Thank you for having me on, Lenny. [00:41:10] S1: What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Scale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs.
00:41:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Christina Gilbert
[00:41:10] S1: What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Scale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs. [00:41:25] S2: Yes. So we just launched OneSchema File Feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in fifteen minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds, and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all. [00:41:47] S1: I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my road map and instead use something like one schema and not just to build it, but also to maintain it forever. [00:41:59] S2: Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of multi day outages from even just a handful of bad records. We are laser focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system, and OneSchema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect.
00:42:18 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:42:18] S1: I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us. And if you wanna learn more, head on over to 1schema.co. That's 1schema.co. Let me, summarize the first five real quick, and then we'll keep going. So the first is wait longer than you think to hire a head of growth. Wait until your product market fit, maybe a million ARR, especially if you're self serve oriented. Number two is if your if your growth is declining, the head of growth won't solve that problem. First, stop the decline at least. Third is redesigning your homepage, marketing page. Rebranding is not only not gonna help you grow, it's gonna probably hurt growth and slow things down. And so just go into that why... Eyes wide open. Four is don't just copy the competition and assume they know what they're doing and assume that what they do is gonna work for you. Use it as inspiration. On the other hand, look at ins... Get inspiration from experts, competition, trends, things like that to help you solve your problem, which you think is no one solved before. It turns out every problem you're solving someone has solved in some way, most likely.
00:43:29 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:43:29] S0: Yes. Especially in growth. I mean, I know this can apply to a lot of product management and to marketing as well. But in growth, when you're talking about how do I lift activation or I have a really big drop off between activation and monetization, these things are a lot more patternized than you would expect them to be. So go and find those patterns as opposed to trying to reengineer it. [00:43:54] S1: Awesome. Okay, let's keep going. Number six.