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foreign y's podcast I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products normally I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-winning experiences building
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and growing today's most successful companies but today is going to be a very different and unique episode launch this podcast about six months ago we've done exactly 50 episodes at this point we've also done over 2 million downloads
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since we launched the podcast is a top 10 technology podcast across apple and Spotify globally and I believe there's about 40 to 50 000 subscribers or followers of the podcast across apple and Spotify which is all very exciting and kind of
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blows my mind and so what I decided to do with this final episode of the year is to look back at the 10 most popular episodes that we've done so far so what I'm gonna do is count down from the 10th most popular episode to number one and
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play a Clipper two from that episode that I found to be most interesting or that's been the most popular never done this sort of episode before we'll see how it goes I think it's going to be really interesting if it's not we
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will never do it again and if it is awesome either way enjoy we're gonna get right into it after a short word from our sponsors have you ever wondered what makes great minds tick I'm Adam Grant and on my new podcast rethinking I'm trying to find
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the answers every week I interview some of my favorite thinkers to learn how we can bring out the best in ourselves and others I talked to death-defying rock climbers oscar-winning filmmakers creators like lin-manuel Miranda entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban and
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thought leaders like Renee Brown find rethinking on Apple podcasts Spotify Amazon music or wherever you listen this episode is brought to you by notion if you haven't heard of notion where have you been I use notion to coordinate
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today again at notion.com Lenny's pod welcome back and let's kick off this countdown with the 10th most popular episode of the Year and that is with April Dunford April is the author of obviously awesome she in my opinion is the smartest person in the world on
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positioning and how to figure out positioning for your product and here's April describing the five steps to figure out your product's positioning say that you're a PM or founder that's ready to start figuring out their positioning for their product what's the
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first thing that you do I actually think the first step in a good positioning exercise is to really understand what do we have to position against so put another way it's it's like saying what do I have to beat in order to win a
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deal so in positioning work we call this competitive Alternatives now how people mess up this first step is I say competitive Alternatives and they think competition so things that look exactly like me but in B2B we kind of
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have two sets of competitors we have status quo which is whatever the company is doing to attempt to solve the problem right now even if it's crappy and not great and then there's if the company does decide they're going to buy
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something different they usually make a short list so it's whoever else lands on the short list so I need to be able to put a stake in the ground and say I gotta beat all that in order to win a deal now most folks will discount the
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status quo but they shouldn't because in B2B we lose about 40 percent of our deals to quote unquote no decision which actually means we lost to the spreadsheet we lost a pen and paper we lost interns and if we're not positioning well against that we're
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never going to get the customer to come off of that so I gotta win against status quo but I also have to win if it's most of the time if it's B to B you don't just buy the first thing you come across you make a short list of
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Alternatives and I gotta win against those as well so step number one what am I positioning against once I have that stake in the ground then I can start thinking about what makes us different so the easiest way to do this is okay
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this is what I have to position against what have I got capabilities wise that the Alternatives don't have so feature function or even capabilities of the company which could be you know pricing or Professional Services or other things
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that you've got but also capabilities of the product what have I got that that the Alternatives don't have and I can make a giant list of these things and then I can translate that stuff into value by going down the list and saying
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okay we have this great feature so what like why does a customer care about it what is the value that feature enables and when I do that mapping over to Value what generally happens is I end up with two or three value buckets or value
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themes and quite often those value buckets or value themes are different than what I would have gotten if I got all the smart people in my company together and said hey why does everybody love our stuff when I do it this way I'm ensured that that those value themes are
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differentiated and not just things that are generally valuable but any alternative could get it done so why are we even talking about it so in my mind that's kind of how we do it once I've got differentiated value then I can
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start thinking about well look I could sell this product to any company that has this problem but not everybody cares about this value the same way and so what are the characteristics of a Target account that make them really really
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care a lot about that value if I do some deep thinking about that that's going to be my definition of a really best fit customer and then the last piece of positioning of course is Market category and so again a lot of people will just start
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with Market category and then try to back up which I think is crazy because and then we don't have anything we don't have any way to judge the goodness of a market category but if I've got look this is the value only I can deliver
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these are the kind of people that really care a lot about that value if I start thinking about positioning is like the context I position my product in then the best Market category is the context I position my product in such
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that this value is kind of obvious to these people this is my long-winded way of doing it but this is this is the only way I know how to get positioning done next up is Crystal wajia who's a long time Chief product officer at gojek
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she's currently Chief product officer at kumu and she's one of the smartest growth Minds that you probably have not heard of here is Crystal talking about why most analytics efforts fail at companies I want to shift a little bit
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to a post that you wrote that maybe is winning more popular posts you wrote on the reforge blog called why most analytics efforts fail and yes I'd love to hear your broad overview of why do most analytics efforts fail and then how do how do teams avoid this maybe what
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are like two to three things they can do yeah I'm actually pretty surprised at how much noise that has generated because I guess it came from a place of frustration where I kept telling people like you were doing this wrong here's
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how you should probably be doing it but I think it resonated a lot with folks because they recognize all of those symptoms but they weren't sure why it was happening so to say like oh this is the thing instrumentation is what's wrong I think
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it's a very actionable thing like it's probably one of the most solvable problems out there it just takes some time and mental model shifts to do it well so a lot of people look at tracking data as how do I track my okr how do I know
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if I'm going up or down but they don't use it to track or identify insights so I will use the example of using Twitter for quote unquote news when in reality they're actually using Twitter for entertainment do not treat metric
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Gathering as entertainment like it's not there for you to be like oh that's interesting how novel and then not act on it so real news is information that changes what you do in the real world and if you don't change what you're
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doing what you are doing is just getting entertainment so let's use that as a premise the next step in instrumentation is to look at the fact that measurements do not equate to insights a measurement would be an observation it's a data point in your database
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so the example being power users do four times more bookings is an observed fact because your transactional database obviously says that that is the case but it's on an Insight because it doesn't have context it doesn't give you
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information that lets you act on it and better understand the problem so another example would be if I see my girlfriend hanging out with a guy I don't know that is an observed fact that you see in the real world your hypothesis could be that your girlfriend
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is cheating on you but the Insight uh the actual fact might be that she's not cheating on you it's her cousin and now your Insight is I am paranoid and I need to change my behavior to be less crazy so the Insight will provide
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value when you have this y answered why is this person doing this thing here's why and then you are going to act differently so for our purposes if we look at a goat food user will transact and is more likely to use a voucher that's a
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fact that's an observation but it's not an Insight an Insight would be something like ghost lead users who are power users are more likely to use a free shipping discount on a high gmv basket versus non-power users and that actually tells you how to
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change your marketing approach it tells you that in what circumstances does someone do this when it's a high GMD basket give power users the ability to get a free discount but do not do this for non-powered users because they won't
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convert any better than they normally would so that helps you change your marketing spend it helps you understand the decision Points of Power users versus non-power users the Insight is instrumenting properties into an event
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so that you can segment who is doing what behavior and make some hypotheses on that observation test that hypothesis and then you get some causal representation of whether or not that hypothesis was right the eighth most popular episode of the
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year is our very first episode with Julie Zoo Julie was a long time design leader at Facebook she's now the founder of a company called Sundial she also wrote the best seller the making of a manager and her newsletter the Looking
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Glass was a huge inspiration to me that helped me start my newsletter here is Julie sharing her advice on getting over imposter syndrome going back to your time on Facebook you made it sound like you just kind of like I joined as a
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designer figured out design became a manager and then like somehow you became VP of design and it sounded too easy and I'm curious what that's like an insane trajectory for someone to follow do you have any thoughts or advice on what
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contributed to your success Rising through the rings that quickly for folks that are kind of just early in their career Maybe absolutely and I want to make it really clear that like the first seven or eight years that I was at Facebook
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every single week I felt like an imposter I had no idea really what I was doing you know the constant refrain in my head is like well do you really deserve to be here do you really know what's happening you know you don't you're not really prepared for this job
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you've never done this before like what right do you have to be put in this situation and and get to do what you do right and that was really a constant referring to my head but looking back you know I I think it probably took me
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about yeah seven or eight years until I became a little bit more comfortable with that you know after seven or eight years I could look back I could see all of the things that I got to work on I could see all the ways that I had grown
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and learned in that experience and something clicked for me where I realized you know it's kind of two sides of the same coin right being in an uncomfortable situation being in a position where you feel like hey you know do I really know how to do this I'm
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not prepared for it is kind of coincides with the fastest and and most intense periods of growth and and you know in one's career and I started realizing well maybe it's not so much of a bad thing right maybe if I constantly
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putting myself in this situation where I haven't seen this problem before that's also what's going to push me to grow and learn right and so yes your last first physical advice I think there's two things the first is well I was lucky I
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was in the right place at the right time I was at a company that was scaling and when you're at a company that grows there's always a lot more opportunity to then be able to try something new right to raise your hand to volunteer for
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things to be just thrown into because somebody has to do it because it's a growing company and there aren't a lot of other people so so the first piece of advice I would have would be like you know if you want those types of
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opportunities sometimes you just have to be at a smaller place and you have to be at a place that is going through that that rate of growth the second thing is you know embrace the fact that it's okay to be in a position
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where maybe you don't know what to do you haven't been trained for it right it it does coincide with that intense learning Maybe approach it with that sense of curiosity and that sense of you know yes it's hard yes I might be an imposter and I might
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feel that way for a while but this is also what's going to help me get there it's gonna it's gonna be what forces me to do the work and in that process learn and become better it's amazing to hear that you had imposter syndrome for such a long period
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of time and you you basically ran design for like the Facebook app right yeah it's kind of an empowering inspiring Insight that someone that at your level went through that for so long and made it through that do you have any other
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advice or thoughts on just like for folks that are going through that because I had that to you for a number of years just like what the hell am I doing here people are going to see I don't really know what I'm doing and it's all going to crumble as soon as I
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make my next mistake do you have any other advice there for folks going through that themselves I think that's so much of the you know just exactly what you said Lenny right I think so much of it that helped me was realizing
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that everyone feels this way to some extent and and that's also why I I always want to talk about that right because I feel like sometimes you can see from the outside you're like oh this person has this title they have this position they have these
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responsibilities clearly they've made it they know what they're doing but that's never the case and I mean logically let's think about it right if you're gonna do anything new for the first time how are you ever going to feel totally
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comfortable you know totally prepared right every time there's something new that you hadn't encountered before no it's always going to be a little bit rough it's never going to feel like perfectly at ease it's only upon doing
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something multiple times that you start to see the patterns you start to realize okay it's going to be all right and even you know now the people that I talk to the people I really look up to the people who I think are role models and
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mentors for me I mean they regularly also share with me that it's the same it's like they you know they still encounter things that are on precedented right and if we work in Tech I mean the rate of change the rate of you know the
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industry and companies and kind of these new experiences that we have that never goes away right that's just par for the course and so I think that feeling always exists what I have learned is that there are better you know Tools in your toolkit for dealing with it one of
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them is of course me just reminding myself that if I feel uncomfortable it's okay other people feel that way too everyone does it's totally natural but then to also find other pieces in that toolkit right one is I am much better at
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asking for help now than I was earlier in my career you know I used to actually just try and hold it all in I was like hey I better fake it till I make it you know if no one thinks that I if everyone thinks that maybe I'm coming to the
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table like I know it then then you know then then I can fool them and now I realize I was really just I was preventing myself from from being able to get that support and that empathy and that camaraderie and that advice that would have helped me actually grow
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faster and maybe with a little bit less pain in the process and so one of the things I've learned is it's okay to ask for help it's okay to reach out to people who both may be going through the same things you're going or maybe are a
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step or two ahead of you in the journey right who have actually gone through that and have lived to tell the tale and can tell you it's going to be okay because often that's just what you need you know you just need people to tell
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you it's going to be fine you're fine you're good you've got this and that you know that's so meaningful right whenever you know we sometimes feel down about ourselves so that's another you know I would say tool in the toolkit right
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asking for help finding groups of support and then I think the third is it's also okay to just be vulnerable and just talk to people about right like you know I found that some of the most meaningful conversations I had whether
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with people at managers or whether with my own reports is when we can you know be much more open about what it is that we find hard what are we struggling with and in that way you know it you actually form deeper connections and and people
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are more able to help out right they're able we can we can spread the load a little bit you know we can put our heads together and brainstorm a better way to solve the problem and I find that too even as like you know the head of a
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department right or like a Founder it's like not going to solve everything myself I'm never going to have all the answers sometimes by just sharing what the problem is by sharing the load L we're all going to collectively come up
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with with a better solution next up is shashir marotra CEO of Coda former vpa product and Engineering at YouTube If you have a Microsoft and here are two of my favorite clips from shashir one where he shares his favorite interview
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question using a technique called eigenquestions and his phse career growth framework I have an interview question I ask it's a very simple question and it's a coded eigenquestion test and the question is is a group of scientists have invented a teleportation
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device they've hired you Lenny to be their sort of business counterpart bring this to Market product this question actually worked well for any rule let's say you could be a product manager for this thing bring it to Market
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um and what do you do that's the whole question right so people usually people will start asking a bunch of questions and say well tell me more about this device like what does it do how does it work and you know is it is it big is it
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small is it fast does it like does it disintegrate things or not does it need a receiver and a sender does it you know it's safe like all these different questions come out and at some point I'll just let those questions come out
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and at some point I'll say okay nice uh nice job done reading all the questions turns out the scientists the kind of hate talking to people and they're kind of annoyed by all your questions and so they've decided that they will answer
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only two of your questions and after that they expect a plan what two questions do you ask and interestingly all of a sudden like the sharp you know product managers Engineers so like and basically every role they very quickly find what are the
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two one or two eigen questions on this topic an adult right answer but I'll tell you like one of my favorite ones is as a product manager said okay if I had to ask two questions the two person would ask one is is it safe enough for
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humans or not and I was a like a very like crisp way to get to like just safety how reliable is it didn't ask how reliable it is how many bits in the middle is like like just tell me is it safe enough for humans or not and the
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second one is is it more expensive capex Dropbox is it more expensive to buy them or to run them and then he took those two questions and he said like just with those two questions I can perform these quadrants you could say oh it's safe
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enough for humans and it's cheaper to they're very cheap to buy but expensive to run then you probably run them like human fax machines like you put them everywhere you can and you say Hey look it's expensive to use but like you all
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have the ability to teleport anywhere you want and this is how I've been running if the other hand they're very expensive to buy but very um but cheaper run you probably have to place them very strategically in which case what you probably do is replace air
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force it's like airports are pretty strategically placed in places where people are trying to trying to get get around places if it's not safe enough for humans then you've got a whole different class of use cases where you go value what goods are transported in
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very costly ways and you know people come up with like you know do you do the most expensive things or do you do like you know is is teleporting you know people's replacement Hearts is that like a like a really demanding big tip so but
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these two questions kind of kind of get to the the heart of it the question's totally made up like there's no teleportation device exists at least not yet and I find that people's ability to learn the method is significantly higher
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if it's low stakes that question by the way if you ask a kid that question the you know a new teleportation device you know you get to ask two questions almost every kid will like quickly get to two pretty good item questions again kids
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are incredibly good at simplifying these things out it's actually a skill we like remove from ourselves like I'll sit on your candidates tell me things like I guess I would ask them what size it is and like why would you ask them what's
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like what what what decision is that going to allow you to make to know what's even and you know sometimes I can explain it but sometimes not and don't get hired but yeah but then actually the thing I'd say about it is there are any
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questions kind of everywhere I mean you could you could take any product out there I'll do it with my kids a lot they'll say you know I was just riding with with my younger daughter and she said you know how come there's three gas
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stations like in the same Corner why why why did why do people do that yeah uh that's a really that's really insightful observation what's the idea question how do you place a gas station and it's like if you could you can almost take
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anything and say what is the question that really drives drives this answer it stands for problem solution how execution eshe so here's how it works so if you're sort of a junior product manager what happens you get handed a
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problem you can hand it a solution you can handle the how you know go talk to this person write this document run this meeting so on and all you have to do is execute run that Playbook and that's all that's all we expect at it you can
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become a little more senior we hand you a problem we hand you a rough solution you figure out the help you figure out the how are we going to organize this what are the Milestones what you know how we're going to get to Market you
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know how to get into the meetings what are the rituals like all those things show up in ndh at some point become a little more senior we hand you a problem and you come back with Solutions you come up and we judge you on the creativity and the effectiveness of the
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solutions and at some point you're senior enough that you tell us the problems and you say hey I know you told me to go work on activation but actually I think our issue is brand right I think our issue is quality or I think our
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issues whatever it might be and that's sort of the the the Pinnacle of of this way thinking about it now just back to this picture for a moment one of the interesting things that happened was that the teams went and they evaluated
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their teams on these two axes and there's they end up with a sort of curved line between them so it's not linear as you as you work your way through and what happens is early in people's career they mostly say it had that e point you get in a problem behind
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the solution handed a how and you just execute and they gradually grow in school later in people's careers similarly you know you're at that P level just do bigger and bigger products and it's like you know the the job of
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being an entrepreneur CEO or an owner or so on is just kind of do bigger and bigger projects but in the middle the the slope changes and all of a sudden it's not really about scope it's about pshe and there's a circle drawing here
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or what I like to call the chocolate dissolution what happens in that phase I was talking to the calibration companies about this the reason we call the top of the solution is for the for the employee for the person this is a confusing time
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like everything about leading up to this moment from high school and college has been about school and like at this point you're all of a sudden told we're not judging you on scope anymore we're judging you on this psh thing that's very confusing to the
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calibrator to the manager it's also very confusing because all of a sudden the difference the way output is the difference between a level three and a level seven may not be scope they may do the exact same job it's how they do the
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job that matters and here's some language for how they do the job and so pshe became a very sticky way of thinking about it it turns out that this way of evaluating people is actually not that specific to product management it's
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generally easy to see why you do the exact same thing for engineers and designers and and so on but to pick one that may not be as obvious I'll pick salespeople like a very common thing people do with sales people is they evaluate them based on Photo attend it's
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like the easiest thing to do is take the sales people and rank them by who hit their quota and who can you go ask the sales team who's the best salesperson and what you'll realize and they'll say quota attainment is just a
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signal for how good you negotiate your quota and pick the right territory really you want to know who's the best sales person they say well you know so and so I mean she can sell anything and she can be in the region that's growing
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or the region is shrinking or the new product or the whole product or and if you think about that terminology it's very similar to pshe thinking like this is the person who can come into a new space identify the right problems and
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solve them that's what makes a really great salesperson so it's become my framework for evaluating talent in into all sorts of ways and you might recognize a pattern of like being a great P thinker it's very correlated with being good with item questions like
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can you spot the right problems it's very similar to Can you spot the right questions can you decide what's important our sixth most popular episode is with Kristen Berman founder of irrational Labs on using Behavioral
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Science to improve your product here is Kristen describing the Three B's of Behavior change there are so so many mistakes that humans make and we can call them biases heuristics our team uses psychologies what are the psychologies that drive us and so to
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tackle this our team basically has created a model of behavior change we call the Three B's and this summarizes the most important psychologies that drive user that are important to the product manager and the marketers we've
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used this at Google Microsoft LinkedIn so all the companies that we work with and they they now use it and so the first B so 3B framework first B is actually not a psychology but it is the most important part of behavior change and it should kind of be
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obvious like if you think about Behavior change behavioral economics it is behavior in order to change Behavior you have to pick a behavior that you want to change so companies are really good at outcomes but just not as sharp at
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picking the behavior when I say Behavior I mean action the thing that you want someone to do by the way the only wrong answer here is log in so it's really it's not about logging in it's about what you do after you log in and when
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we're Consulting teams would be like we need to get uncomfortably specific we say just really specific in the behavior so example if I'm Peloton pm and I'm working on the app I would say something like within seven days of somebody starting the app they do two
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10-minute workouts with two different instructors now obviously that is wildly specific and you'd probably be very happy if they did one workout with one instructor but the reality is if you don't Define that behavior you're going
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to change you can't actually Define the psychologies that affect someone's decision making when doing that behavior so that's a first be second B again in probably pretty obvious and is very critical it's just barriers so we need
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to reduce the barriers to doing the behavior there are two types of barriers we look at one is logistical so this is just the stuff in our way it could be entering a credit card could be any form field and then the second is cognitive
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so the cognitive barrier is getting our way as well these are things like uncertainty aversion this is optimism bias information aversion right these are the things that would prevent status quo big one it's just you do the same
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thing today that you did yesterday right so your job can you talk about those three just throughout there just briefly I'm curious about the specifications while we're there so uncertain version when something is uncertain or we're not
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so I'll give you an example if your lift there's logistical friction which is wait time but then there's also this uncertainty of is it going to come on time when is it going to come and with this uncertainty you're probably going to look for other options you're going
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to open up Uber and say like maybe it'll come faster and so when there is uncertainty in our life we either look for other options or we just don't make a decision at all right this is by the way very big in in healthcare where when
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you're very uncertain about something you may not even go to the doctor or you may just make the wrong decision got it and same with status quo effect where you know we kind of underlying status quo effect it's this idea that we always
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take the path not always but majority of it you don't really say always when you're talking about human behavior human behavior is very complex but and more often than not we take the path of least resistant so we do the thing
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that's easiest and typically the thing that's easiest is the thing that we've done yesterday and the day before and so when you're asking someone to do something different which is what most this product especially startups are
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trying to do you actually have to increase you know their motivation or make it easier reduce the barriers to get them to do that and so status quo effect is a big big one that folks are fighting awesome thanks for sharing this the third B is
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benefits so this is where you want to increase the not just benefits but the immediate benefits of doing something so we are all present bias which means we prioritize our present self over our future self so there are plenty of
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reasons that somebody your customer your user should take an action but you actually have to give them a reason to take an action today so as an example if you're Asana and if you're trying to get someone to log a task the right thing for them to do is
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log the task because it's going to get their project done on time you're going to have a collaborative and communicative team that you're going to want to be on but one of the real reasons we may log a task is because of
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completion bias we want to see the checkbox we may log it because of social desirability bias where other people see that we're getting our work done there's a notification that goes to my teammate when I complete something so these are
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the immediate benefits that we have to build into products and features to drive to drive use awesome I I definitely have completion bias I love checking those freaking check boxes this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security
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the fifth most popular episode of the year is with the great elenaverna on B2B growth Elena is currently head of growth at amplitude prior to that she was CMO at Miro she was senior vice president of growth at SurveyMonkey and she might be
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the smartest person in the world on B2B growth just putting that out there here are two clips from Elena the First on white retention is so important to your product and why it's so important to get right and the second on what to put into
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your freemium product versus your paid product I think every single company has to First focus on being product LED and retention period the only way that you will ever have any chance of acquisition being product LED is if you nail your
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product-led retention let me break it down retention falls into two main kpis which is activation and then engagement if your product is not able to activate and more importantly engage via habitual loops and be in the hobbit-forming zone
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then you'll have no chance to hooking an acquisition in jail into your product because acquisition and product LED means users and buy it or users refer or users create content that attracts other users well if your users are not
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habitually using a product there's less and less opportunities for you to actually create a sort of product-led acquisition so never start with product LED acquisition you first always have to start with product LED retention activation and engagement then you can
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choose is your product has a relationship of one to many if it has a collaboration at its core say slack or Miro or even the amplitude or does it have a more of a single mode relationship so let's say snowflake there is not one too many
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relationships there between users well if you have one too many relationships product LED is a fantastic way for you to prototype that model if you don't have them then it becomes increasingly hard and most of the B2B products don't
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have that one-to-many relationships so it's very difficult to stand up product-led acquisition so you rely on marketing lead and sales lead and that's fantastic those are fantastic growth models as well the only other question
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becomes in the self-serve monetization that's product LED otherwise you go in the sales lead and you chase after those large contract values and you can still be product LED and monetization with sales team via product LED sales or you
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can just be self-served if you have a specific segment that is valuable for but the question there is your use cases and your Market matureness to handle self-serve or do you need that sales touch every industry and every sector is going through transformation
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at different velocities so even if you don't have that product like sales or self-serve in your industry now I guarantee you it will pop up in the next 10 years and if you're not going to introduce it you will get disrupted by
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it for a product leader or founder who's thinking about what they should make free in their freemium model do you have kind of a mental model of how you think about here's what you should make free or is it or is that too big of a
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question for for a quick answer so I mean you'd first have to align on what your strategic value of free is I do have a general framework of saying freemium has to do has to check one of these boxes does it help my indirect monetization so
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some sort of virality or network effects if it does I'm probably gonna make it free does it suffice for every single user regardless of their complexity if it does then it's probably commoditization of the feature anyways and I should make it free does it help
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my aha moment if it does then I definitely want to have a POC as part of my free and I'm going to put it in in the free offering does it create Hobbit Loops for me so let's say notifications or some sort of Channel communication if
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it does then I'm probably going to put it for free so anything that actually creates friction for my growth model I'll probably gated in the paid anything that promotes my growth model I will put it into free now it is very heavily dependent on your
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actual monetization strategy so it's a little bit of over-encompassing statement but at the end of the day I'm thinking about it very much how does free help me achieve my growth model outcomes without sacrificing
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monetization potential our fourth most popular episode of the year and just to put this out there the next three have came in really close to each other so you can kind of mix and match them in order but at this point
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the fourth most popular episode of the year is with Ethan Smith CEO of graphite and just general SEO Guru here are two clips from Ethan one on how people often under invest in SEO and two signs that SEO might be right for your product I
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think people under resource SEO a lot of times and over resource ads so if you're Zillow you're going to spend tens of millions of dollars on ads or if you're eBay you're gonna spend tens of millions of dollars on ads why would you not have a really great
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SEO team like the amount of traffic is probably equal to that so you're going to spend 100 million dollars on ads why would you spend fifty thousand dollars on SEO that doesn't make sense what are just attributes of a product or a company
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that tell you that SEO could be a growth driver and or a massive growth driver because I imagine SEO isn't useful for everybody how do you how do you think about that there's two big things uh the first thing is is the addressable market
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large so is the addressable market for SEO large and for most categories it is the second is do you have authority do you have existing traction if you start from zero and you have no traction so we we talk with uh seed seed stage
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companies and series a companies typically they don't have a lot of authority and it's too soon and Google doesn't want you to just be an SEO site and I want you to be a credible domain before they rank you and if you're starting from zero they don't
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have enough signals that you are so the way that we assess that is I will go into the first signal I'll look at is what's your traffic what's your current traffic and your non-seo traffic is actually an authority signal so I'll go
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into similar web I'll put the domain in I'll look at the total traffic and I'll want to see at least I would say a 1 000 visits a day roughly for for non-seo at least you have five visits that that that's very little and
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then the second thing I'll look at is the number of referring domains so I'll go into ahrefs or sem rush and look at the total number of referring domains I'll try to have at least 1 000 roughly referring domains you could grow with
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less than that and less than a thousand visits but it's much harder and the more you have the easier it is to grow and the faster you can grow the more you can grow and then in terms of the addressable Market that's a little bit more
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complicated but most markets are pretty large actually in SEO but we want it to be large so with powers and actually an interesting example so they're a clinical trial uh lead gen site they want to acquire people to take clinical trials
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how many people are typing online I want to take a clinical trial not not very many but the number of people that could be taking clinical trials is very large and so if we target the Persona like what's the key demographic of who might
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be a candidate for uh taking clinical trial it's very very large and so we can then create content that targets that like gig economy or college students or people like that and so if you think about targeting the Persona most sites
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have a very large address of Market but the way that I would think about the addressable Market is that which is what's what product am I offering what are the use cases for that product what is the Persona what's the size of that
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and then I would assess that typically by looking at external uh benchmarks so if I'm a shopping site I can and I haven't started yet I can look at other shopping sites I can see how much traffic they have so again I can go into similar web if I'm wish.com and I want
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to see what you know what my traffic potential is I can put in Walmart and Wayfair put it in similar web look at their total traffic you can get similar webs free for all of this and then I can get a sense of how how big I can uh get
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the one other thing I'll mention is that there are product competitors and audience competitors so for something like uh I'm at a wework right now so for wework I could look at the traffic for other you know rental office companies or I could look at
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companies that are ranking for the kinds of things that I would want to rank for and they might not be direct front of competitors so like fintech is interesting so for Robin Hood Robin Hood could look at other sites that allow you
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to sell stocks in crypto or they could look at Investopedia Investopedia doesn't allow you to buy stocks but they have a bunch of traffic it's not a product competitor but it's an audience competitor and so these competitors
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basically can tell you what the size of that market is so that's how I think about the addressable market so ideally it's large it typically is and then the more Authority I have the more I can compete if I'm starting from zero it's
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probably too early but once I have traction SEO can then multiply that traction we are now in the top three who could it be drum roll the third most popular episode of the year at this point is Doshi shreyas was a long time
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pm at stripe before that he was a PM at Twitter at Google and is generally just an incredibly insightful and helpful human constantly sharing his wisdom on Twitter and now he has his own course on Maven here is shreyas describing the LNO
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framework which people have brought up so many times after this episode and that I've personally found incredibly useful when I just joined Google as a relatively new PM this is back in 2008 for the first three years I was overwhelmed and stressed and that
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was because one I was a new PM in this like really high performance environment I was working on some important products and launches and I just had too much to do and I look back at that time and it was perhaps the most stressful
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time of my career or I would you know work long hours Etc but even at the end of the day I'd feel highly dissatisfied because my to-do list was endless and I wasn't able to make a dent on it and you know I was also a little bit of
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a perfectionist so I was like no no I need to do this well and yeah I was just constantly I would come home and talk to my wife and kind of basically just complained to her about how I'm not able to make progress or as much progress as I want you know
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when that was accompanied with like you know not being able to sleep very well because I was concerned about how much output I was producing and whatnot and so again very stressful time in my career and then things changed when I
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discovered the ideas related to this LNO framework in a blog post and I can't unfortunately I can't even find that blog post somewhere but it had some ideas that I took and then kind of created this LNO framework on myself which is essentially that like as a
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product manager or as anybody in a creative high impact High leverage role all your tasks are not created equal there are actually three type of tasks that you end up doing in such a role so there are L tasks which are leverage
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tasks and the L tasks are such that when you put in a certain amount of effort you get 10x or 100x in return in terms of impact so those are L task leverage tasks then there are neutral tasks so that's n and those are tasks where
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you you basically get what you put in or just a little more than that so you put in 1X and you get 1.1 x those are neutral tasks and then there are overhead tasks where you get back in again in terms of impact you get back a lot less than you
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actually put in and it turns out that many people many people who are ambitious or are perfectionists like myself they by default treat each of these types of tasks the same way and therein lies the problem so this was the Epiphany for me back at Google when I kind of discovered some of these ideas and what I realized is that among the things in my to-do list there are actually only very few L tasks and so it made sense for me to focus a lot on
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those L tasks to take on those L tasks when I was feeling most productive most energetic during a certain time of the day and for the L tasks let my inner perfectionist shine because I'm going to get so much more in return right it makes sense for me to spend
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that time on that PRD for instance related to an important feature that will meaningfully impact our Revenue right I'm gonna spend more time on that than I ordinarily would so now where does that more time come from because it
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cannot come from just working more hours well it comes from spending less time on end tasks and no tasks and so there are some tasks that you do a classic example of an O task is say an expense report right like it sounds silly but I used to
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try to make my expense reports really good wow and and sometimes like that's funny you know that made no sense right like but I was like no no I need to do that and again this is the silliest example but there are many examples and
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something I realized is that the same type of activity can actually be either an L task or an end task or an O task so what's an example so say like a classic PM activity of filing a bug report right and so many companies have these
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bug templates etc etc right like that you use to file a bug report well it turns out that filing a bug report depending on the situation depending on what type of bug it is can actually be an l-task high leverage task and over
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there you want to file a very detailed explicit bug report and in other cases might actually be an O task where you don't fill out the template that diligently and you don't add 15 screenshots with annotations right instead you just have one
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screenshot and you hit submit on the bug report so so that shift where usually for the same type of activity we we provide the same type of Engagement one last example I'll use to illustrate this is taking notes it turns out even taking
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notes taking not synthesizing them and then sharing them can actually be an L task an end task or an O task depending on what type of nodes they are so if it's like you know after I understood this previously I would just send all notes like I try
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to make them really good which took a lot of time but then I realized well this is a meeting where yes I need to send notes but you know again it's like it's just standard stuff I just need to like quickly list out people all people
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need to really know is the three action items that came out of the meetings who owns them that's it and it is not about something highly strategic or controversial well in that case I'm just going to send the notes out the moment
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the meeting is over I'm just going to hit send because I've already taken the action items right I'm not going to try to make my notes look great so that others can appreciate or shreyas always sends great notes on the other hand if
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it was a product review with the CEO about a very contentious topic that you have gone back and forth multiple times and now you made a decision about something you want to perfect those notes before you send them out right like you want to get the language
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right you want to be very clear on what the decision is so there's no room for misinterpretation so you don't backtrack afterwards or people say well but I thought we said this or so that's an uh that's a case where it's an L task and
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yeah I would say just spend an hour or even two hours perfecting those notes because it's an L task so hopefully that helps illustrate the some of the ideas behind the LNO framework runner-up for the most popular episode of the year is
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my conversation with Marty Kagan Marty is the Legend of Legend of product managers and I'm not surprised this episode was incredibly popular here are two my favorite clips for my chat with Marty one talking about why
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big companies are just bad at product often and two the four steps to be a good product manager still BS shared his theory from 1995 for God's sakes his argument was as a company gets bigger product historically became less
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important the people in a company that would be that would be celebrated were marketing people sales people Finance people because if a company stops innovating these are the engines for growth right sales marketing or not growth with Finance but cutting cost
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and and his argument was this this happens over time pretty soon these are your leaders they're the ones that have been promoted so then what happens good product people don't want to work there anymore and they leave and they go to a company
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that values product I think that's a better explanation than any other that I've heard and it was so prescient because when he said this this had yet to even happen to so many other companies but it still happens all
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the time you know I I hate the idea of those companies that have separate product owners because product owner is just an administrative role product owners almost never have the skills to be a product manager and that's a problem but let's just say there's a
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product manager and nobody's ever coached this poor person and so they really don't know much so the first thing that product manager needs to do is get themselves prepared to contribute to their team the way they need to in
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general that means four things first of all they have to really get to know the users and customers the second thing is they have to be an expert in the data how is your product used how is that change over time what's the sales analytics what's the user analytics the
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third thing is and this is usually the hardest one and it's the one that your stakeholders will judge you on is you have to learn the different parts of the business you have to know how it's marketed how it's sold how it's paid for
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how it monetizes if there are any compliance regulatory privacy security issues you need to know what those are so that you have to convince those stakeholders that you understand what the issues are and you understand what to look for and
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that you convince them that if if there's ever any question you will bring them a prototype that they can see and make sure it's okay so you need that trust with the different parts of the business and the fourth there is you have to know
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the competitive landscape you have to know the industry you have to know the trends those are the four things you you bring to the team realize the designer who doesn't have this info the engineers don't have this info if the team is
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going to be an empowered team and they're going to come up with solutions they need somebody on the team that brings this knowledge and that is you as product manager that is the single biggest area empowered teams fall down
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the product manager is ill-equipped or a nice way of saying incompetent and finally our number one most downloaded most popular episode of the year which race to number one as soon as they came out is with the one and only Matt mashari Matt is a full-time CEO
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coach he's worked with CEOs of companies like open AI coinbase notion Rippling angelist so many other amazing folks that I could just keep listing in this episode there are just so many nuggets of wisdom and I could share a hundred
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clips from just this one episode but I'm gonna choose just two one the power of small teams and how small teams often get more work done and two advice for having hard conversations with your employees and with people in general
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enjoy my companies have done a lot of layoffs and and here's why the companies that I coach back in March of 2020 there was a chance that the world economy was imploding now of course by April and May we realized that wasn't the case that the tech World kept going
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in fact was even flourishing but in in March of 2020 we didn't know that and so you needed if you were being fiscally responsible you needed to prepare for that eventuality you so you needed pair costs eighty percent of costs in any
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tech company is payroll as humans so if you're going to Compare costs you actually have to let go of humans and so almost every one of my companies did some on the low side of five percent some on the high side of one company
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that was is a hotel company um Let Go 40 because it looks like their business was about to get obliterated and the results were crazy within 60 days of each layoff the CEO reported back to me it's insane I don't know how this
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happened but the company is now operating better I'm not talking on a relative scale I'm talking an absolute scale we're putting out more features more code our nps's up our whatever it is whatever department is performing better
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and the only answer for it was we've got less people so it's this coordination issue is reduced with fewer people in the organization things work better that's the big realization that most people never discover so they hit product Market fit
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they get tons of money from investors not just higher higher higher higher but every additional human you have in your organization causes extra overhead and geometrically so because now that you have to keep all those people informed give them all
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context make them all feel heard Because unless they feel like they're contributing and you understand what they're saying then they feel ignored and they feel passed over and they feel disrespected and grumpy and so there's
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this morale problem that exists so there's this friction of information flow and a morale problem that grows and grows and grows and really the only answer is I mean that's why people bring me it because they're growing growing growing and
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things are breaking so I have a system that keeps things together but it doesn't make it like perfect it just makes it so the company doesn't fall apart but the really the ideal is just to keep the team super small and that's what WhatsApp did that's what
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Instagram did that's what linear is doing right now that's what notion has been doing for a while and those to me are the real success stories whenever I have a difficult conversation I started off hey this is going to be a difficult
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conversation I want you to take a few seconds to prepare yourself you're not going to enjoy this and what I found is is that the way the amygdala gets triggered is often because of surprise and so if you give someone just a few seconds to
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mentally prepare then the amygdala often doesn't get triggered nearly as hard because if they're aware that they're going to go into fear if they're going to go into anger they're going to go into sadness they then they can see it
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coming and they go oh that's what it is but if they don't see it coming just surprise and all of a sudden what it grips their whole brain and now they're in it and they don't even know they're in it so that's the first thing I do this is
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going to be a difficult conversation are you ready person says yes then I share the news I'm letting you go here's why that then the second so that I give deliver the message the third thing is then I say I I now they're feeling emotions
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strong ones even though I warned them they're still feeling it now you want them to be able to release those emotions and so I say to them my guess is you're feeling a lot of anger right now fear sadness is that true and if so would you be
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willing to share with me what you're feeling and what you're thinking and sometimes they don't answer but many times they do and they share with me and they let it out and that's important to allow them to let it out and then I
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make them feel hurt and I actively listen and that makes them realize that I'm not trying to run away from the pain that they're feeling I'm not trying to leave them alone with it I sit with them as they have it and then I try to help them
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get through it and that's our top ten it was actually really hard to make this list because all 50 episodes have something really fascinating and interesting to share for example if you need help with pricing strategy don't miss the madovan episode
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if you want to get better communication don't miss the episode of West cow if you're building a Marketplace there's the Dan hockenmeyer episode if you're trying to figure out your marketing and how to build your marketing function
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don't miss the episodes of Emily Kramer and Ariel Jackson I could keep going but I'm just gonna stop here I encourage you to check out the full list of episodes in case you're currently facing a problem that one of the episodes can
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solve to close this podcasting Journey has been so much more fulfilling and exciting and interesting than I ever expected and I'm so thankful for you for listening and for supporting this podcast telling your friends about it I'm also really thankful to our
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wonderful sponsors for supporting this work terms of what's ahead basically more the same more amazing guests more topics that maybe you haven't thought about that you need help with maybe more amazing topics that you know you need
1:00:08
help with that I want to help you solve I'm still learning how to interview how to do this podcast how to make it more amazing and so my goal is just to continue to refine and iterate and continue making this podcast better and better
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with that I'd love to hear from you what do you love about this podcast what do you hate about the podcast what annoys you what do you find most interesting I'd love to hear your feedback you can either email me at podcast lennyrichitsky.com
1:00:37
you can also go to this episode on my newsletter if you go to lennysnewsletter.com and find this episode you can leave a comment at the bottom of that episode you can also DM me on Twitter if you just want to reach
1:00:48
out directly seriously I'd love to hear from you this is how I'm going to make this podcast better until then happy Holidays happy New Year from the bottom of my heart thank you for listening and for supporting this podcast I'll see you next year