Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:15:30 · Elena Verna
[01:15:30] S0: Yep. Let's do that. Okay. Great. So the list of my favorite growth frameworks. And to me, by the way, it's not a solution, it's a pattern. It's a pattern that exists across almost every single company out there and it's a starting point for your ideation and to figure out how you can almost shortcut to possible list of solutions as opposed to trying to figure out too hard of how to even define a problem on its own. So number one, it's probably expected if anybody has read anything or listened to me talk, is growth loops. I think anybody who thinks about growth anybody who thinks about growth in the funnel fashion versus understanding what the growth loops are is missing out on the ability to create sustainable growth engine. So, it's very important to think about actionreaction that generates another action, and it's a self contained flywheel that can spin. A lot of resources on it at Reforge, Brian Balfour and Casey Winters and Andrew Chen wrote a lot about this. Highly recommend anybody looking into. My next favorite growth framework is actually written by you, Lenny, and Dan, which is a race car framework. Everybody has a really hard time often thinking about what are all of the parts of growth initiatives and which are long term, what are short term, how much are they going to actually produce in results. And RACECAR framework is wonderful because it separates different initiatives into, hey, there's some engines, loops, that are just going to keep on spinning. There's some fuel that you're going to need to add into it, potentially like paid marketing dollars. There's some turbo boosts that you may have in your race car that are going to be, let's say, big user conferences that you're going to hold as a product, or there's lubrications and optimizations that you're going to need to do of pouring oil into that engine so it actually performs correctly. It's beautiful. I talk about it all the time with everybody. The next favorite growth framework for me comes from Bangaly, and that's adjacent user theory. I think that one's very powerful in terms of thinking about growth evolution.
01:17:40 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
And as we talked about adding different growth models to your growth ecosystem, different growth loops, but also adjacent users which are outside of your ideal customer profile or ICP, outside of your core user, and how Growth Team can really bring them in and add additional to your product without even expansion of product market fit by just optimizing their experiences. I'm gonna stop at these three because I think those are the most powerful ones. [01:18:09] S1: Cool. On that last one, Bangaly was on the on the podcast. We'll link to that episode if you wanna go deeper on the adjacent user user theory. I love how, like, that was, like, a few minutes on things that could change people's life if they adopt one of these frameworks and learn how to think about growth in this way. It's, like, such a powerful mental model for thinking about all the stuff you've been talking about this entire conversation. [01:18:30] S0: Yes. Those frameworks are like my church in my mind, like how my system of beliefs, of how I think about growth and how I think about it on the strategic level of owning it as a strategy, not just like a tactical or an initiative. [01:18:47] S1: The Church of Elena Verna. Amazing. Okay. So before we wrap up, I wanna bring us over to, contrarian corner, recurring segment on this podcast, where I like to ask the guest if there's something they believe that most other people don't believe. Contrarian opinion, you might say. Is there anything that comes to mind?
01:18:47 · Lenny Rachitsky, Elena Verna
[01:18:47] S1: The Church of Elena Verna. Amazing. Okay. So before we wrap up, I wanna bring us over to, contrarian corner, recurring segment on this podcast, where I like to ask the guest if there's something they believe that most other people don't believe. Contrarian opinion, you might say. Is there anything that comes to mind? [01:19:08] S0: I do have a very contrarian opinion, although it's not so much related to growth as opposed to maybe your personal growth. And my contrarian opinion is that full time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skill that you have. It's one of the packages that everybody should evaluate and take advantage of. But too many people blindly default to that package and don't explore other options that are both available on the market as well as best suited for their personalities, for their interests, and for their skill set. It's like a default plan that everybody subscribes to that is faulty in itself. [01:19:57] S1: Wow. Okay. Wait, we got to hear more. So what are some other packages? I think we're like buying some of these packages, these other options. But I guess what should people be thinking about when you say this in terms of what can they actually do and explore?
01:20:08 · Elena Verna
[01:20:08] S0: I'll I'll premise it to saying I don't wanna rain parade on full time roles. They're wonderful on your ability to learn, to get the expertise, and depending on which career stage you are at, full time roles might be the absolute necessity for you to move on to and unlock the next level. However, full time roles box us into one company that may not be a great fit for us culturally, for our skills, for our ambitions, for our interests. Life is too short for that and ability to really go and figure out your own best monetization model, just like you work on that for your business, you should work for that on yourself without an assumption that full time is the only option that you should have. So, what are the other options? There's so many. Obviously, the couple known ones, freelancing. You can be a contractor. I do a lot of advising and consulting because for my brain of how I work and how I like to puzzle solve and pattern match, it works much better to be horizontal across many companies versus vertical on one specific one. But that doesn't mean I still don't take those vertical engagements to deepen my knowledge into any specific topic. But overall, it's a lot more interesting for me to pattern match across multiple companies and help them grow as opposed to just focusing on one. There's interim engagements where there's a predetermined end date to your agreement. There's fractional engagements where you're working part time on something as opposed to engulfing yourself completely full time. There's other ways to create courses. There's a way to create newsletters and monetize them like you're doing, Lenny, such a fantastic job. So, there's just so many options and people are sometimes paralyzed by fear of instability that it creates when you start to explore other options because you don't have that contract with that one company that provides you that paycheck every two weeks to rely on. But at the same time, you can create diversification for your career and you can create stability. It just depends on when you need to pull that trigger and when is the right time for you to explore. But to spend your entire career only assuming full time is the only way, I think is a complete mistake that a lot of people are doing. One
01:22:33 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:22:33] S1: of my favorite posts of yours is along these lines, which is around increasing... What you wanna do is increase optionality. Yes. And I guess talk about that because I think it's a really powerful So piece of
01:22:44 · Elena Verna
[01:22:44] S0: this advice of career optionality being the ultimate north star for anybody in their professional journey is something that I'm very strong on because a lot of people have the goal of, I don't know, maybe I want to be a VP, or I want to become a CEO, or I don't know, I want to be a manager and I want to like people manage. And this becomes their north star and they start working towards it. But a lot of people, they get to their perceived corporate ladder north stars, find themselves extremely dissatisfied, depressed even, by how terrible that job is. Could people manage your job? I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy because it's a terrible job if you don't enjoy it and you don't know if you're gonna like it until you actually do it. So I think setting a title as your goal, which so many of us have titles as goals, is very wrong way to think about it as opposed to saying, Hey, my goal professionally is actually to have options so I can choose what I want to do, so I can choose what fits my life right now, that I can choose what fits my skills and that fits my personality, and that makes me happy. And to get career optionality, if that's your goal, you start thinking about your progression a lot differently. You're not starting to think about it of what will get me to the next title. You start thinking about what can I do next year that will increase my option pool? And that's very different than just getting to a higher title. And if you start thinking about evaluating opportunities or like whether you should stay at the company, whether you should move at the company from the lens of, does it increase my options if I stay at this company one more year? Or does it keep it the same? Or does it actually potentially decrease? That is the right way to find your ultimate happy place and happy job that brings you energy, that brings you happiness versus just going for a title and then being very disappointed with what that brings along with it.