The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra, Coda, YouTube, Microsoft

[00:00] I generally value the reference check over interview signals. [00:02] If I had the stack rank in interviews, what is the best signal? [00:06] The reference check is the top of the list. Those people, they work with this person sometimes for years. Their knowledge, what you're going to get out of 30 minutes of artificial scenarios, it's just like... [00:17] never going to compare with what a good reference check will give you [00:24] Shashir Mehrotra is the co-founder and CEO of Coda. Before starting Coda, Shashir led the YouTube product engineering and design teams at Google, where he spent over six years. Before that, he spent six years at Microsoft. He's also on the board of Spotify. As you'll hear in this episode, Shashir is an incredibly deep and very first principles thinker on all kinds of topics. And in this episode, we cover growth strategy, specifically a framework that he calls Blue [00:50] loops. We talk about the rituals of great teams, something that Shashir has been passionate about and has been collecting from all of the best leaders in tech for the past two years, and which he'll soon turn into a book. We talk about Eigenquestions, which is not a German game show. He shares how he evaluates product talent and gives some really great advice on doing reference checks. We go into so many other topics. This is the longest episode that I've recorded yet, [01:20] going for at least another hour. And so with that, I bring you Shashir Narotra. Hey, Casey Winters, what do you love about Coda? Coda is a company that's actually near and dear to my heart because I got to work on their launch when I was at Greylock. But in terms of what I love about it, you know, I love loops and Coda has some of the coolest and most useful content loops I've seen. How the loop works is someone can create a Coda and share it publicly for the world. This can be

[01:50] those codas can then be easily copied and adapted to your organization without knowing who originally even wrote it. So they're embedding the sharing of best practices of scaling companies into their core product and growth loops, which is something I'm personally passionate about. [02:05] I actually use Coda myself every day. It's kind of the center of my writing and podcasting operation. I use it for first drafts, to organize my content calendar, to plan each podcast episode, and so many more things. Coda is giving listeners this podcast $1,000 in free credit off their first statement. Just go to coda.io slash Lenny. That's coda.io slash Lenny. Hey, Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. [02:35] CSV files from their customers? At least 40%. And how many of them screw that up and what happens when they do? Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data [03:05] Improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important. Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify, and Zora are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile. It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

[03:35] Check out Flatfile at flatfile.com slash Lenny. [03:44] Shashir, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. [03:49] I don't think I've actually shared this with you, but you're actually the very first CEO that I've had on this podcast. I actually have a rule. [03:56] of no founders or CEOs on the podcast, at least at this point. [03:59] And you're the first person that I've let break this rule. And so how does that feel? [04:03] I've always been a rule breaker. [04:07] Perfect. [04:08] Uh, [04:09] So bio for listeners, just briefly, so you're the founder and CEO of Coda. [04:13] You spend six years at Google where you're a VP of product and engineering for YouTube. [04:18] basically leading the YouTube product team, spent six years at Microsoft, [04:21] Here on Spotify's board of directors, [04:23] You're also a prolific online writer, and that leads to my first question. [04:28] which is I hear that at Coda there's a contest internally for [04:32] people who actually, so maybe a little context, you encourage people to write a lot of stuff externally within Coda. You want people to be writing. [04:39] And you have this contest of [04:41] who gets the most views and likes of people internally. And so is that true? And who's winning? [04:47] By the way, yes, it's sort of true. We did a similar thing. [04:51] at YouTube and YouTube creators, I mean, obviously kicked our butts, but we were here in a good way to make sure we understood our tools and learn how it worked. And, you know, I think for a while at YouTube, I had one of the top videos. It was a really cute video of my daughter taking everybody's orders when she's like three or four years old. That's not fair.

[05:12] Yeah, super cute kid is an easy trick for YouTube, but I get to learn all the tools and so on. You know, here, the equivalent at Coda is you can publish Coda docs. They show up in the gallery. You can see lots of them. And... [05:27] At this point, [05:28] Thousands of documents are published from lots of different people. It gets millions of views. And like at YouTube, the most popular ones are not ours. But it is sometimes helpful for us to make sure that we understand how the whole system works in order to do it. [05:43] So I think that the current [05:45] Winning Doc at Hoda [05:48] is um is one in a pretty deep niche it's from a guy named kenny wong on our data team and it's an orange theory workout doc so it turns out that orange theory has this like deep subculture that they all hang out together on reddit and so on and this doc just took off as uh i don't really understand the doc because i'm not in that subculture but kind of similar to youtube in some ways it's [06:13] The niches are actually much bigger than people think. [06:16] Of the ones that are more work-related, I think Lathedock on two-way write-ups still outranks all of mine. [06:22] But I have a couple of good ones on there, too. I would say this competition exists in my family, too. I don't usually even win with my own family. My older daughter, Anika, who also had that great video on YouTube, has two docs that do really well. One is... [06:37] family quarantine olympics which is a thing she put together at the beginning of uh coveted like a fun game for families to play and the other one is a score tracker for a game called ticket to ride which i don't know if you ever played the game it's like it's about the most complicated scoring system on the planet because like you play the whole game and you spend 10 minutes scoring it and she built this little scoring calculator

[06:58] and that turns out to be super popular too and so anyway but my docs do okay but yeah some the [07:04] Kind of interesting variety of what people are doing. [07:06] I love that. Which of your docs has been the most successful? Hopefully we end up talking about it. [07:11] I think it goes back and forth between two docs I've written, one called EigenQuestions, which I think you intend to talk about. So we'll get back to that. Yeah, absolutely. And the other one is one I wrote a while back. [07:23] Called Four Mits of Bundling. That's all about how subscriptions work and kind of how I ended up on the board of Spotify was Daniel and I kicking out on bundling theory, which is like a super weird hobby. But, you know, I have normal hobbies, too. But I like that. I like to explore bundling as a kind of fun hobby and people enjoy that thought as well. [07:41] Yeah, you've shared a lot of good thoughts on that. And we're not going to cover that because you've covered that in depth in many places. But just to clarify, did you write that doc and that led you to being on the board of Spotify or is that? [07:50] after the fact. [07:52] the conversation led to a napkin sketch. [07:58] at YouTube that [08:00] turned into... [08:01] a really fun lunch I had with Daniel. Daniel liked the Spotify podcast. [08:06] founder to you. [08:08] and then he encouraged me to write it down. And for me, I mean, I don't, you write prolifically and I, I have a, [08:15] writing for me is actually surprisingly hard. I feel like I have to think about it. Same. [08:22] You make it seem really easy. [08:25] For me, like, [08:26] He's like, "Could you write that down?" It's like, "Great, now I'm going to take a year to write this thing down." Because you think through each part of it and you kind of come up with the right framing. I have a little review process I use for my docs that allows other people to kind of help me make it better, which is always really helpful.

[08:42] But yeah, so that's how that started. So it got written down after. [08:46] Yeah. [08:47] So we're talking about writing and content and things like that. And that's a really good segue to the first [08:52] thing I wanted to talk about, which is black loops and blue loops. [08:55] which to folks that haven't heard this before might sound like some kind of ultimate fighting nightmare scenario, but it's something that is really important to you and Coda. And so to set it up, can you just talk about what... [09:06] black loops and blue loops are. Yeah. And it's probably worth mentioning, I think a lot of businesses have [09:11] a diagram that describes their ecosystem and how it works. [09:16] Sometimes it happens a little later in a [09:19] It accompanies journey for us. We're probably three or four years in before Matt Hudson runs our data finance teams here. He came up with this diagram and it really stuck for people. But I highly encourage drawing a diagram like this for your business. I'll flash it up on screen for a second and I'll describe it. But this is what the diagram looks like. [09:39] Black Loop, Blue Loop. [09:41] And it's basically the two different ways that our product spreads. The black loop is someone comes in, they make a doc, they share with a group of people, some subset of those people turn around and make another doc, and the process repeats itself over and over again. [09:53] The blue lube is someone comes in, makes a duck, [09:56] And instead of sharing it with the team or with the collaborators, they publish it to the world. And in that process, expose it to, they can choose how it should appear. What publishing code is a lot like building a website. So you pick a URL, you tell us whether or not Google should be able to find it, show up in the gallery and so on.

[10:13] And what ends up happening from that is they turn into... [10:16] broad promotion of Coda, but really it's about that person, what they're trying to get, trying to get done. [10:22] And I'll stop sharing so I can talk a little bit about the dynamics. So I sometimes refer to them as the Microsoft loop and the YouTube loop because those are like two inspirations for it to the black loop. [10:33] Feels a lot like how documents naturally spread, like the viral actions of a of a document platform are share, create, share, create. It happens over and over and over again. You know, the best way you learn about Office or Google Docs or so on is somebody shares one with you and you're like, oh, that's pretty cool. I bet I could create one. And that loop can happen very, very quickly. [10:52] and it really drives [10:54] for us, a lot of how we think about how we work mostly within companies and teams, but sometimes across them as well. And so, for example, it led to our pricing model. So our pricing model is... [11:06] a little different than most companies in the space that we do what they call maker billing. So basically all document products, all product of the document metaphor have three personas, people who can see things, people who can change things and people who can create new things. [11:18] Basically, everybody charges for the top two. They charge for... [11:21] editors and makers. If you can make changes, then you have to pay. And that's like every document product you can think of, including ones, you know, do drawing or so on. They all kind of do the same thing. And we decided that we're only going to try it for people when they make a document. So the, you think about it, you get a Coda doc, you only need one, you know, if you're using any of our paid features, you only need one paid license for doing it. And the reason we do that in terms of that diagram is I wanted no friction on the share edge. I mean, the share edge

[11:51] hey look I'm doing this thing it's so cool and that's the moment where [11:56] The line I gave to the team is, I want no dollar signs in the share dial. Every product has its moment of how you spread growth. Going back to YouTube, imagine you had to pay for people you shared with. Nobody would ever share anything. But that's how basically every... [12:11] Productivity product works is the moment they charge you is when you share with somebody. [12:16] The blue loop, I often call the YouTube loop, because the emotions of publishing a doc are incredibly close to that of publishing a YouTube video. And people have all sorts of reasons why they do it. I mean, sometimes people do it. There are people who do it for money, but a lot of people do it for exposure, for brand building. They just want to get an idea out in the world. They want to get feedback. Some people do it for fun. Some people do it as a charitable contribution. There's lots of reasons why people do it. [12:43] But the net effect of what happens [12:45] is [12:46] you know for YouTube the vast majority of how people found out about YouTube was through [12:49] a video that was shared with them. That's sort of the [12:53] the impact book, but it changes the dynamic [12:56] that [12:57] allows everyone who publishes a code doc now is a very natural incentive to go share it with the right population. If you're in Orange Theory, you share it with the Orange Theory population. If you're into playing Ticket to Ride, you share it with the Ticket to Ride population. But if you're into bundling, you try to find a small group of people that care about bundling and tell them about that. But the... [13:17] And what happens for us is, [13:19] That then becomes...

[13:21] Hello? [13:22] that means that most people's exposure, and almost a third of our users come through this loop, they're not actually exposed to Coda. They're exposed to a great idea for... [13:33] how to run an offsite or how to win ticket to ride or whatever it might be. [13:40] And in that process, they learn about the product. And so then they come in through this vehicle, [13:45] And one reason it's very important is because for products like ours that are very horizontal, [13:50] You get... [13:50] You get... [13:52] You get different types of users. There's some users that I call the building block thinkers. They like to kind of build up from scratch and the blank surface of code is really amazing for them. But for most people, that's intimidating. I don't really know what to do. Most people in the world are problem solvers. And so they start not by, do I need a new document? They start with, I've got a problem. We don't make decisions fast enough at our company. Or my family can't figure out what to do on the weekend or whatever it might be. [14:18] And then when they find a solution to that problem, they then pick the right tool. And so the blue loop allows us to go after that. And it kind of changes... [14:26] changes how [14:27] the motion of the ecosystem works as well. But that's what we'll be looking back to. [14:31] Awesome. I have a bunch of questions I want to ask. The first is, [14:34] How did you, for a founder listening to this and they're like, oh man, what are my loops? What's my flywheel? How do I think about my business? [14:41] Can you talk a bit about how you kind of came upon this way of thinking about the company? [14:45] And then also, how do you structure teams to kind of work in this way, if this is the way you're thinking about growth? [14:50] Maybe on the first part, I think you just hosted Casey Winters. He's pretty famous for talking about loops, not funnels. And I do think there's a very natural thing when you're building a product or building a business to think about your funnel. And you think about things as being linear, that somebody comes in, they go up to your signup process, and then they see your onboarding, and then they get exposed to the first magic moment in your product and the second magic moment and so on.

[15:20] sharing is built right in your product, or maybe it's not, or maybe there's a way that it happens through advocacy and, and so on. But understanding that the way products actually grow and spread is, [15:29] happen through some type of loop, not funnel, is I think pretty fundamental. So your first piece of advice I'd give is you probably do have a loop. Whatever the product is. [15:39] There's probably something about it that causes that loop and understanding how that works is really important. [15:44] In terms of what it is, [15:47] In our case, I'd say [15:50] if you take Black Loop and Blue Loop, you know, the Black Loop is, you know, every product in our category has that. I mean, it's not, it's actually, we didn't invent it. I mean, you, you, you build a document, you put a share button on it, you know, every product has that. But sometimes it's just recognizing what's there. It's not, it's not that, it's not that interesting. The Blue Loop, on the other hand, is not something that every product in our category has. It's not really a thing that you expect to do with Google Docs or Office or so on. It's a, it's kind of our unique take on, hey, we're going to build a publishing platform that isn't, [16:18] just for sharing ideas and building things with your team, therefore putting things out in the world. I mean, one of the best compliments we hear about the Koda Gallery is I had this user tell me this line I really love. He said that the Koda Gallery feels halfway between Medium and an App Store. [16:31] And you can come and you can read about anything interesting in the world. And... [16:36] you can go shopping and say, I need one of those, I need one of those, and I need one of those. And it's my view that this category, what we call the all-in-one doc category, I think this is... [16:45] going to be critical. I don't think [16:47] that there's enough people out there that are looking for like a horizontal new blinking cursor. I mean, they exist and you can get through your first million users that way. But I think to get to like the level of

[16:58] of impact we want to have. We've got to find this problem seeker. So you probably have a loop, not a funnel. [17:04] And... [17:05] It might be hiding in plain sight or it might require invention. That's the bounder dance and the fun of it is. But finding it, writing it down, I think is really helpful. [17:15] Um, [17:16] Oh, how do we organize a team? Yeah, but let me ask one quick question. He said this, I think it was a data scientist that kind of first... [17:23] imagine to kind of diagram this out because I'm curious as a founder listening, they're like, oh, how do I find something like this? [17:29] I imagine part of this was, oh, this person brought you this interesting way of thinking and [17:33] there's kind of this process of, oh, wow, this is cool. Let's think about this. What was that like kind of just high level? [17:39] He currently runs data in finance for us. He's actually one of the early founding members of the team, Matt Hudson. So he's kind of done every job here, really good marketing. He's very insightful. But honestly, the idea can come from anywhere. I mean, it's a really famous loop diagram for Uber. [17:55] that I think one of the board members drew it or Travis drew it. I don't know. Big Builder Elite. Yeah, right. Like I said. [18:02] Yeah, the napkin sketch, who knows how true that is. Probably lots of dispute on that. I think Airbnb had a similar diagram. We tried. We had some sketches. Right, right. [18:16] It can kind of come from anywhere. I do find that [18:20] the most natural place to see it is just when you're talking about your business to someone you're pitching a customer or a candidate. I think we're going to talk a little bit about interviewing, but I think talking to candidates is one of the best ways to hone what your business is about. Because those people are...

[18:37] in some ways even more critical than investors. I mean, they're investing their [18:40] They're investing their time, not just their money. [18:43] And so your ability to get across to them why this thing is going to be interesting and how it'll grow. And they're kind of the most discerning investors out there in a lot of ways. And they're actually not that easily confused. [18:55] by [18:56] metrics and so on that can be temporary and they sort of put themselves in that picture of like, can I see that happening? [19:04] And so for us, the black loop part is pretty obvious. For the blue loop part, you had to squint a little bit to think, [19:10] Will people really do that? Will people come [19:12] and publish these documents, [19:15] like some hybrid between websites and blog posts [19:19] and templates like what what you know what are they gonna what are they gonna do and why and [19:23] And so it required a little bit of creativity, which forced me to get better and better at pitching why that's going to happen and what that world is going to feel like. And this analogy of halfway between medium and an app store is like that might help people crystallize what that promise has to feel like. [19:39] So I think that [19:40] This idea can come from anywhere, but if you want to mine for your own loops, [19:44] Go look at what you told the last few candidates you talked to. [19:48] I like that. And it just takes some take some attempts of drawing some kind of diagrams. That's kind of how I thought about that. [19:53] when I was thinking about it. Do you find that the quality of user is different amongst the loops? I imagine one is like 80% of the growth, but maybe the other is a different... [20:01] type of user, maybe higher quality. [20:03] I think about a little bit with Airbnb referrals. [20:05] drove higher quality hosts

[20:08] even though it was still a small portion of all hosts and so it was a really [20:11] lucrative and interesting channel. Do you find anything like that? [20:14] So, I mean, quality and activation are a little bit different. I mean, the blue loop definitely... [20:19] So there's actually kind of three entry points on that diagram. Those people come through the blue loop. [20:23] that people get shared through the black loop and that people come through the top of the button. It has to be like your seed population, right? Somebody starts with blinking cursor, nobody shared anything with them, either a blue loop, a templated document or black loop, a way the team is running. If you look at activation, retention, so on, certainly... [20:43] the highest is the black share. I mean, you're kind of, [20:49] somebody shares a document say, "Hey, this is how we're running the staff meeting." You're just going to use it. So the job of retention there [20:56] is all different. And actually one thing that is [21:00] Actually, let me come back to that. Second best is through the blue loop. And then the third, you know, the worst, the artist is activating through the very top. And, you know, from there... [21:09] you know, roughly one in five people make it to what we think of as our activation moment, which is hard, right? It's like, you're going to hand somebody a new product that they didn't start with a problem on and nobody handed them a document to say, just work in. Like that's hard. Now you got, now all our next flows are really important and so on. But if you think about these three different dynamics from how you, how you asked about how you structure your team, they're like incredibly different mindsets, right? Because, [21:32] You come into the top of that diagram, we get to own the conversation. [21:36] Like we tell you, we have our opportunity to tell you what the product is about, what you should do with it. Here's the here's the minimal set of things you need to know in order to be productive and gradually reveal the other things that you might need to know. Being the order of those things wrong, real trouble. But it's actually a minority of how people get exposed to Coda because in the black blue.

[21:55] The person who owns that conversation is the person sharing the document with you. [21:59] does it and like mispositions it or doesn't like just makes a crappy document or something like, you know, we can't. [22:05] We have to like... [22:06] Help them. [22:08] onboard their users, which become our users. And same thing in the Blue Loop, you know, that conversation is now owned by the publisher who's, you know, they're really not that interested in teaching anybody about Kodak. They're mostly interested in [22:20] Here's this really cool way to do Orange Theory, or here's this interesting way to run a meeting. And so one of the interesting things about building platforms, which I think is a little bit different, [22:31] then [22:32] than products that get to be sort of direct. [22:35] For better or worse, most of the products I've gotten to work on are platform products. And I find that there's two very different kinds of people that like that challenge. So some people, and I think Steve Jobs was the quintessential example of he didn't really like being a platform. The iPhone shipped without an app store. They locked down the screws on all the devices so that nobody could open them. [22:58] And his viewpoint was, I'm going to control every element of what my users see. [23:03] And on the other hand, platform thinkers, [23:06] you sort of assume [23:08] that my connection to my eventual user is through someone else. Like YouTube, you know, I regularly come to work at YouTube and somebody say, well, here's what happened last night. [23:17] you know and and uh sometimes it's heartwarming like oh my gosh this person you know this kid bit this other kid's finger and it took off like crazy and you know this this uh korean pop star just like broke through the billion view mark before everybody else did and sometimes it was not heartwarming and you don't get to control that because that's part of part of being a platform and so it does change you know how you think about

[23:39] the way you run the team because [23:41] If you have a loop, [23:42] Where? [23:43] Your... [23:45] community, ecosystem, user, so on. [23:47] control that narrative [23:49] then you have to incorporate that. I mean, another close analogy I think is like, you know, Airbnb and the famous story of them taking pictures of people's apartments. It's like, [23:57] They had to reach out and try to control that. Eventually, you can't do that. You have to [24:03] You had to sit back and let people... [24:05] market their hotels. And thankfully, the ecosystem got good at it. But it kind of has a similar dynamic, I think. [24:12] Absolutely. With Airbnb, pricing is even more of a challenge. A lot of hosts don't really know what to price. They think their price is worth [24:18] a lot more and we can't [24:20] tell them the price. There's laws around that. It's like, "Hey, maybe you want to price it at this rate." [24:25] you know, it's good for you. So it's a lot of encouraging. So yeah, I've seen that in action. [24:30] So you talked about teams and how you think about structuring them a bit. And that's a good segue to our second topic. [24:35] which is around a book that I hear you're writing called The Rituals of Great Teams. [24:40] And I think what you're doing there is exploring rituals that have emerged at some of the more successful companies. And so just a question there, how did you get interested in rituals? [24:49] So much so that you decided to write a book, which is such a trudge and endless amount of work. And just like, yeah, how is it at? How's it going? And I'll ask a few more questions there. [24:59] You know, the writing a book, so I'm writing this book, Skull Rituals of Great Teams, and the... [25:03] When I signed up to do it, I thought it was going to take six months. I'm now almost two years in. [25:08] I mean...

[25:09] I know my manuscript in four months and I, [25:13] I'm probably half done. So there's a lot of work ahead of us in, in, um, [25:19] But it's one of the most fun projects I've ever done. So the history behind this was, as in many cases, is a lot of, you know, sort of odd luck and happenstance. I got hosted right at the start of the pandemic. I was interviewed for a different podcast called Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman. [25:38] And the way Reid records, which is not, I'm not sure I would recommend this, but he does it a little bit differently than you do. You sit down with no idea what you're going to talk about. You talk for like three hours. [25:49] And then he has a group of editors, the same group that actually edits Ted, and they come in and they pick 20 minutes of it and they turn it into an episode. And you have no idea what it's going to be. So he's talking, talking, talking, gets 20 minutes out. And they're pretty good at getting to a nugget. [26:01] So they picked out of this whole discussion, this part that I thought was like really small. And it was, um, [26:09] Reid had asked me for one of my favorite quotes. [26:11] And I talked about this quote from a guy named Bing Gordon. People don't know Bing. Bing was one of the founders of Electronic Arts. He's a famous investor from Amazon, Zynga, so on, lots of great companies. And I happened to sit on a board with Bing, and he used this line. I think Bing's one of the best nonlinear thinkers in the Valley. Always learned something with that. [26:28] with Bing and he used this line that really stuck with me. He said, [26:33] Grey Companies has a very small list of golden rituals. And there are three rules of golden rituals. Number one, they're named.

[26:41] Number two, every employee knows them by their first Friday. [26:44] And number three, they're templated. [26:46] And he has great examples. Amazon has six pagers and Google has OKRs and Salesforce has V2 Mom. And there's all these different rituals that, [26:55] that people do. [26:57] And I ended up sharing on the podcast a little bit about what Koda's golden ritual is. If you were to ask a [27:03] a set of Coda employees on the first Friday [27:05] what Cody's Golden Ritual is, it would almost certainly [27:08] tell you about this thing we do called Dory Balls. It's sort of the key of how we [27:12] run meetings and do write-ups and so on. It's a pretty simple idea is that in our write-ups, instead of... [27:19] And in our meetings, instead of going around the room and hearing what everybody thinks, we do this thing called pulse. Everybody writes down what they think and we hide everybody else's. [27:28] until you're done writing so you kind of you force yourself to to be eloquent about your opinion and [27:34] on the record about it and unbiased. And then the second thing we do is called Dory, which is instead of sort of randomly asking questions, we ask people to put the questions on the table and then we take a round of uploading and downloading them. [27:47] to actually figure out what we're going to talk about. Dory's named after the fish who asked all the questions. It's a tool we use a lot at Google that we kind of turned into this mini tool. [27:55] If you were to ask a set of CODA employees on the first Friday about CODA's Golden Rituals with Bing's three tests, they almost certainly talk about Dorian Pulse. And it's not because they're meeting wonks. It's because it's indicative of the culture of the team. And so the... [28:08] I'll regularly hear employees say things like, "I just joined Coda. It's been a week. It's amazing. The culture is so open."

[28:16] that I got to ask a question in a meeting and it outvoted the CEOs. Or they'll say, I got asked for my contribution to this really hard decision we're making. [28:25] And it was thoughtfully presented. I had space to be able to do it well without bias. And it was actually rather considered as part of the decision making process. [28:34] And so the podcast on your podcast did pretty well. And I got all these questions about rituals. [28:41] And so I decided... [28:42] to do a dinner, which turned into a dinner series. And we basically, every third Wednesday, we would host a group of people to share the rituals with each other. And I learned a bunch of stuff in this process. And I've now interviewed over a thousand people for this book. And, you know, there's lots of really interesting rituals that come out of it. [29:00] Well, first thing I learned is people love sharing their rituals. I've interviewed people from [29:06] Many companies that everybody's heard of, Nike, Disney, New York Times, all the way down to many startups that maybe people haven't heard of or companies and industries that people don't talk a lot about. [29:18] book authors, pundits, lots of different people that come to this process. [29:23] Everybody loves sharing their rituals. Everybody's a little secret to how they run their business. But for some reason, the how we work part, [29:29] video everybody's very willing to share it [29:32] People also love hearing about them. And I was kind of like, is this going to be interesting for dinner? Like, you know, geeking out about how a team worked. And it turns out not only do people like hearing about it, it's the littlest details that matter. It's like, oh, yeah, we kind of do that, too. But we have this issue. How did you get past this? And you start discovering that actually those little details are what make or break a thing that, you know, you can't quite do it the exact same way.

[29:55] And then the other thing I realized, which is probably the most important point, [29:59] is that rituals are, I like to say that they are a mirror of culture. One of the attendees of Dharmesh Shah, [30:06] founder of HubSpot and very thoughtful person. He talked a lot about this thing that is virtually presented as something called flash tags, which is a really cool example. But Damesh talked about how we... [30:18] When we're building companies, we actually build two products. We build one for our customers and we build another one for our employees. That's actually how we work part of it. That's the term he uses for that is culture. That's the product we build for our employees. I think it's a very interesting way to define what culture is. Interestingly, when you ask people about their culture, hey, what's the culture of Google or Airbnb or so on? [30:38] The way they'll answer the question is through rituals. [30:42] and say, here's what we do, and the way you know this is what we do is through this ritual that [30:49] that's in place. I thought that was pretty interesting. I started off just building a little listicle, like here's all the great rituals. And I started realizing that actually the comparison between them is kind of interesting. And so I started sort of filling in the gaps between them of like, when would you do X versus Y? And what did I learn through that process? [31:06] Publisher asked if I would turn it into a book. And I agreed without really contemplating how hard it would be. And it's become what most of my evenings end up being on this. I have a wonderful co-writer, Aaron Dame, who's incredibly gracious with her time. [31:22] and are helping me sort through the best ideas and the worst ideas. But it's a really fun project.

[31:29] What are some of the more wacky and or impactful [31:33] rituals that you've come across that you can share. [31:35] Oh boy, I bet it. [31:37] It's sort of down the list. I'll tell you some that are [31:39] interesting and recognizable. One of the most fun ones... [31:44] And he is from Ariana Huffington and she shared a, [31:47] a ritual called reset. [31:49] And there's a bit of background on Ariana. [31:52] I mean, well-known for Huffington Post, she now runs Thrive. She had an accident a few years back and ended up going through this period of doing a lot of research on how the brain works and ended up coming to this set of conclusions about how you can affect your own brain chemistry. And one of the things she does as a sort of personal ritual is, I think, called a reset. It's basically you make a one minute video that is personal. [32:22] But it's a breathing exercise. It's like you you're supposed to like play it while you do this breathing exercise. But it's personal. So it's like her video. You go search YouTube for Ariana's reset. You'll find it. It has, you know, it has pictures of her kids. It has it has quotes she loves. It has videos of her hometown in Greece and so on. [32:39] But the way she brought it to the team was they start meetings by randomly picking someone. They call it spin the wheel. They randomly pick someone and they play their reset. [32:48] And the idea is you get this like two for one where everybody gets a little bit [32:55] the brain chemistry rewiring of 60 minutes, 60 second breathing exercise, everybody gets

[33:00] back into that sort of Zen state a little bit. And you learn a little bit about each other. And the just saying that, you know, the pictures people pick and so are interesting, but actually the music people pick is one of the most interesting, like a lot of people pick calm music. Some people will pick something they rock out to some people, but you know, everybody does their reset a little bit differently. That was a really fun one. [33:19] Another really fun one that I was surprised by, Gusto, [33:24] does this thing in their hiring call. So you get an offer from Gusto [33:29] And apparently... [33:30] When you get on the offer call of congratulations, you got an offer, instead of just meeting the recruiter, which is what most companies do, they have the entire group of people that interviewed you join the call. [33:40] And they all say something about why you're amazing and you should join Gusto. [33:45] And like I said, it's such an interesting ritual in so many ways. I mean, like it's a for the candidate, obviously, like what an amazing experience is like, you know, the to use an Airbnb term, that's like a level 11 experience of what that what that feels like. But also for the company, it's like, hey, we're like. [34:03] We're going to get, you know, I had one of the questions I asked, what if I voted no? What if I said this person's a no hire? I said, it doesn't matter. You're on the call. You're going to work with this person. You're going to help them feel welcome and you're going to help them understand [34:14] where they stand. I think it's a, obviously it takes a bunch of time, but it's also is a signal to the company of how important hiring is. It's something that obviously we all prioritize. Those [34:26] And uh, [34:27] Uh... [34:28] maybe different ones that people might not have heard of before. Those are amazing examples. Have you integrated any of these rituals from other companies doing this research into Coda?

[34:37] All the time. And it's the cheapest form of research. [34:42] I get to borrow all these great ideas from all these companies. We just added one to our decision-making process. This is a good example of a little detail that really matters. Coinbase has a ritual that's formed around this as a decision-making ritual. It's amazing how many companies have a decision-making ritual with a name, with a verb. [35:02] Um, [35:03] At Square, Vocal called them spades. He kind of verbified it. There's a template. But you use Bing's three tenths, right? It's got to be named. Every employee knows it by the first Friday and it's templated. So Coinbase does a thing they call Rapids and Rapid is framing around what the... [35:24] The roles in it are the responsible approver, participating, informed, and decider. But their technique of doing it was really interesting. They have this subtle nudge thing that we weren't doing that I've now incorporated at Coda. At Coda, we have Dory and Pulse, a very common ritual. We do. It's spread through a lot of different companies that use Coda. You don't really have to use Coda to do it, but I think Coda is pretty good at it. [35:51] But one of the things we were facing was that you would do this pulse, [35:55] And so you have a meeting and it could... [35:57] If you did it wrong... [35:59] It could feel like voting. [36:01] And it could feel like consensus building. And so we would get this [36:05] you know, people would talk about it and every ritual has its like pro and con, but people would look at it and say, very open culture. You're allowed to share whatever you want. But on the other side, for the person that's trying to make a decision,

[36:16] It can feel like, oh, my God, I now have 30 pieces of feedback. [36:21] Am I supposed to wait for like... [36:23] all 30 of them to be yes? Am I supposed to wait for it to be a majority? And how do I know? What am I supposed to do here? And so Coinbase had this really simple idea that we sort of smooshed together, which was at the top of their rapids, they named who all the people were, [36:38] And then next to each one, they put a little box that said, what is the decision from that person? And just organized. It's very similar to Paul. So they kind of organized them and said, like, [36:48] Yet everybody that's in the informed bucket can like they can comment. It's totally fine. But we really care about the approvers, the responsible. And then, of course, the decide the one that really matters. And so we just added a column to our pulse, which is what is the role? And we group the table by that. And the other thing that going with this is like sounds really interesting. [37:08] Subtle and small, but really in detail, it really matters. [37:11] is the person running the meeting pre-fills that with what they want from that person. You are an approver. Maybe I have three approvers because I have a budget approver and I have a marketing approver and I have a sales approver, whatever it might be, and I need you to give me this answer. I don't need you to comment on everything I'm doing, but I need you to tell me do we have the budget or not. I need you to tell me, am I authorized to make this change in this part of the product that we generally don't change? Or can I change the onboarding flow or whatever it might be? [37:39] And we took a process that I think was like doing a pretty good job of getting rid of groupthink, which is really the part of what we're doing with Pulse. [37:46] but had this danger of being...

[37:49] overly leaning towards, uh, [37:52] Consent is building to a fault. I think consensus building is a good thing, but consensus building to a fault is not. [37:57] And we sort of stole this one from Coinbase and we switched it in and it got better. And that's a good example very recently. [38:04] I feel like you have a clear bestseller on your hands here, and I can't wait to read this. I almost feel like you have an unfair advantage right now having all these insights. [38:12] before you share them. [38:14] being able to execute so much more efficiently. [38:17] Well, yeah, it's interesting. I don't think it's... I'm obviously not trying to keep any of it a secret. So the whole point of publishing it is because I think other people... [38:25] will enjoy it and can get benefit out of it. [38:30] But if people are interested [38:32] One of the other choices I made in writing this book is I decided to do it somewhat in the open. So there's what I call the rituals of great teens brain trust. [38:41] And so if you go, if you just search for me and rituals of great teams, you'll find it. And I'm sure we can add the link to the show notes, but you can sign up. And basically, as I finish a chapter, I put it out to the group. And there's now a few hundred people that are helping me co-edit this thing. [38:54] Some of them, just because some of them come in and give me help on storytelling, grammar, and so on, but a lot of them are contributing. They show up and they say, hey, you missed this one. We actually do that, but we do this other thing a little bit differently, and you should really talk about that, because I kind of view it as a... [39:09] It started as a dinner series, right? It started with a, everybody's going to give to each other [39:15] And so I kind of wanted to bring that into the writing process. It's also a cheap way to get some pretty good editors. And it's pretty helpful. I love that. That is really smart. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A-B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential.

[39:45] integrate with a modern grow team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage. Epo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Epo lets you go beyond [40:15] metrics and instead use your Northstar metrics like activation, retention, subscriptions, and payments. And Epo supports tests on the front end, the back end, email marketing, and [40:26] and even machine learning clients. Check out EPPO at getepo.com, get EPPO.com, and 10x your experiment velocity. [40:36] How have you found these rituals form for someone that's listening and are like, we need some of these. We need some rituals. We need to. [40:43] move more effectively? How do these come up? Are they just organically organized? Do they come in from other companies and they evolve? Is it founder-driven? [40:50] What have you found so far? I know you stopped working on the book, but curious. There's a whole section of the book on, I get this question a lot of like, well, you know, how do I find the rituals we have? How do I adjust the rituals to match? Are they supposed to change? You know, there's lots of, [41:04] Lots of things you see because some rituals are like great when you're 100 people and they're terrible when you're 1000 people. [41:08] and you should actively change those things. Some are great in what sometimes people call peacetime versus wartime. You should do this during this time, but you should actively not do it when you're in this other time. And actually, that in itself is a ritual. I mean, every company has

[41:23] some form of a war room ritual that is, I guess Facebook, I was learning, [41:28] We did a dinner last night, so I learned a little bit about baseball player. They call them lockdowns. [41:31] which is a term I hadn't heard before, but apparently like it's well understood. When they say lockdown, everybody knows exactly what it means. It's like we no longer do the goal setting process. We, you know, you drop this type of work and like everybody just knows this is what this is what it means. [41:44] But I would say that [41:45] you know, [41:47] when we talk to people about rituals, [41:49] There's a set of rituals that happen organically. I mean, those are the easiest. Like Dorian Pulse for us was one of the product commanders running a meeting. Just thought it was, we're a distributed first culture, but like, [42:00] I hadn't really adapted to it properly. And this fireman was just annoyed at waiting around on Zoom for everybody to go around and say their piece. It just took forever. [42:11] By the end, everybody's like, "Can we just pause and write down what you think?" I just happened to do it in this awful way. [42:17] And it just took off. And so some rituals grow organically and just you just got to like wait for them to do it. [42:24] But there are cases where companies actively form a ritual [42:27] to drive a certain behavior. [42:30] And, you know, the best advice I've given on this topic is, [42:34] to read one of my other favorite books. This is... [42:39] It's a book called Switch. [42:40] It's by Chip and Dan Heath. All their books are amazing. They also wrote Decisive and Made to Stick and Moments. [42:47] And so on. But this one is my if I could recommend five books. [42:50] This would take two slots on the list. [42:52] And the subtitle of the book is How to Change Things When Change is Hard.

[42:55] and [42:56] The basic idea of the book is they use this analogy of an elephant or a rider on an elephant on a path. [43:03] and [43:04] When you're trying to change things, you have three options for what you can do. And actually kind of Matt. [43:09] to Bing's analogy. So you can direct the writer, so you can tell people what to do. [43:13] You can motivate the elephants. You can kind of give this thing a kick in the butt and it's going to move. You don't know exactly where it's going to move, but it's going to move. [43:19] And you can shape the path, shape the path is I'm going to set this way up so that you can only do these things. And so the way I think about it is, you know, direct the writer, tell people what to do. That's why, you know, if you look at Bing's test, that's that's why you teach employees this before the first writing. You tell people like this is what we what we do. And so some rituals like how do you get this ritual to work? You put it in your new iron boarding and you make it work that way. Motivate the elephant. A lot of that's about branding. So what do you do with rituals? [43:49] people that seem like a great ritual, I would highly encourage you to give it a name. [43:53] Give it something that lets people anchor ideas to me. Names are a very powerful thing. If I said, oh, yeah, CODA, we do voting and sentiment writing. [44:03] or something, I don't even know what you would say. It would sound boring. It wouldn't sound like something you could brag about, something you could form identity around. And so it's very important to give it a name. [44:12] And then finally, why do you shape the path? Or you set things up, you templatize, make it as easy as possible to follow this ritual and make it just a part of what we do enough. Then if you're at Gusto and you're like, I don't really understand that Zyran culting where it's like, guess what? You're going to be invited to one soon. You're going to see it and then you're going to have to do it. Or if you're at Square, you're going to see this Bay template and you're going to

[44:35] you're going to learn how to do it. So I think Switch is, I recommend this book for lots of purposes, but as you're thinking about rituals for your, [44:42] for your teams. It's a particularly relevant frame. [44:45] Awesome. By the way, that's a little plug for the YouTube version of this podcast, which is now a thing we do. So if you're like, hey, I don't see what you're talking about. Just search for Lenny's podcast YouTube and I think you'll find it and we'll probably link to that. [44:59] I'm also reminded of Airbnb's rituals, which you probably already know about, but they're kind of all hilarious and weird. [45:05] One is Formal Friday, where people dress up in suits and gowns on Fridays. [45:10] Another is a human tunnel for all new employees where every new employee has to run through a human tunnel and jump into like a beanbag or something. Yeah. And then. [45:18] And then there was a new hire tea time where new hires drink some tea with some [45:22] veterans and chat about where they're from and things like that there's a bunch more but [45:26] Those are the ones that are my favorite. [45:27] Those are great. And there's a [45:29] I also included some of the sort of level 11 thinking as well. I think that's also a good... [45:36] Chesky favorite. Brian also has another one that's in the book. [45:39] That's about how to rank your to-do list by finding leverage. That's a really fun one as well. [45:44] They're like, don't write your to-do list. But a lot of people do like importance versus urgency or so on. And I guess he sorts his by which of these is most likely to create leverage, like getting rid of the rest of my list. I started doing that in my to-do list and it's very interesting and impactful. [46:02] That's actually an incredible segue to our next topic, which are eigenquestions. Oh, yes.

[46:07] And so I get questions. One of your most classic posts, you mentioned this at the top, maybe your most [46:12] liked posts other than maybe bundling [46:14] It sounds like some kind of German game show. I get questions. [46:17] Can you tell us what I can questions are? And then I'm going to ask you a few more questions around that. [46:22] I had thought about the German game question. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. I don't know if this would be a very interesting game, but we could try to create one. Okay, so I'll describe what Eigen questions are, but maybe I'll start by telling you a little bit about where the concept came from. [46:38] And this is actually a YouTubism. [46:41] that maybe just a [46:43] place ourselves in history. So 2008, I joined you to [46:46] And, um, [46:48] Many people don't remember this, but YouTube at the time was seen as a mistake. It was seen as Google's first mistake. [46:54] First, bad acquisition. Everything else had worked, but this thing seemed like a disaster. [46:59] It was grainy videos. We were losing lots of money. We had billions of dollars in lawsuits. None of it really seemed that obvious. There's lots of discussion on how to reorient it, fix it, and so on. [47:11] And so everybody outside, that's what they saw. [47:14] If you step inside a YouTube staff meeting in 2008, [47:17] Actually, one of the toughest questions we were answering was this question we called the modern family question. [47:22] And, um, [47:23] It may sound small, but it actually was kind of very perplexing. The question was pretty simple. The question was, [47:29] If you looked at our search traffic at YouTube, one of the top five queries basically every week was for a show called Modern Family. [47:36] And Modern Family was number one show on television at the time.

[47:40] By far the most popular [47:42] And we were second biggest search engine in the world behind our parent company, Google. So search traffic was very important. [47:48] There was one big problem. People would come to work for modern family. One big problem, we didn't have modern family on YouTube. [47:53] And so we give them some pretty crappy responses. [47:56] And the question was, [47:57] And by the way, ABC.com had decided to post every episode of Modern Family. [48:03] live on their website, which nowadays is kind of typical. But in 2008, that was not typical. Those is kind of a big gamble they made and they're going to post all these shows. It's like, [48:13] So the question was, [48:15] Yo! [48:15] Should we answer the query modern family? [48:18] by linking off to abc.com. Do we link out or not? [48:22] and the company basically divided and so it's like half the half the company [48:26] mostly the product team, the end team, so on, kind of aligned around a viewpoint that was, that's what the user wants, link them off to abc.com. We're not owned by Google. Google tries hard to prioritize, do right by the user, the rest will follow. That seems like the right thing to do, so let's do that. [48:41] And in the other half of the company, most of the business functions, sales, marketing, especially content partnership, [48:45] Say it. [48:46] Please, please, please don't do that. If you do that, [48:49] and you start linking off to all these other places, nobody's ever going to put good content on YouTube, and we're just going to get the stuff that doesn't deserve to live anywhere else. That's not a very good path to be. [48:59] And you can imagine that those two mindsets [49:01] It's almost like it was like good versus evil debate. [49:04] which is like, [49:05] do right by the user of the business. These are all like, [49:08] almost impossible to solve

[49:10] problems. [49:11] And this would like happen. [49:13] Meeting after meeting after meeting. Did we make a decision? Yeah, modern family, what are we going to do? So we had this offsite. [49:19] We decided we're going to like... [49:20] spend the whole day and we're going to figure this problem. And we went up to this, this hotel in Apollon Bay and the executive team all sat down and I was asked to frame the discussion, go collect everybody's opinions and collect all the data and just like ground it all in facts. And then we're going to have a discussion, we're going to reach a decision. [49:36] And so the night before, I'm sitting and thinking about how the hell am I going to have this discussion not just be like a shouting match of this good versus evil position. [49:45] And I happened to read an analysis that was being done by a different team at Google, the Google Shopping team, where they were facing this interesting challenge of... [49:57] They were in this deep fight with Amazon and they're getting their butts kicked and they were trying to figure out why. And the walking in theory was... [50:04] the Google Shopping team's view was, why would anybody ever go into Amazon? You could come to Google and we had indexed all of Amazon and the entire internet [50:14] Why would you ever pick Amazon? And the feedback that was coming back from users was, [50:19] They'd say I picked Amazon because I value consistency over comprehensiveness. They would say things like, you know, I really value that. [50:28] I go to Amazon.com and I understand how the reviews work and how the ratings work. I know that the returns work the way I want. I understand that shipping is going to work. It just felt consistent. I know it doesn't have everything. [50:39] But it has enough and I value consistency over comprehensiveness.

[50:43] And so the night before this YouTube meeting, [50:46] I decided to reframe the question and say, let's not have the discussion about linking out at all. [50:50] We're going to start. [50:51] by having a theoretical discussion about in a decade from now, [50:55] Is the video market more likely, the online video market, more likely to be about consistency or about comprehensiveness? [51:01] And that is a question that you can have a very reasonable debate on. [51:05] What are the reasons why a market evolves towards consistency or comprehensiveness? [51:10] And we basically have this discussion and we all came to a conclusion. [51:14] This market is going to value consistency over comprehensive. [51:17] And by the way, I think now almost 15 years later, I think we're right. I mean, I think you go look at the video market obviously has exploded. There's so many great video properties out there. None of them are comprehensive. [51:26] There is no one-stop shop. [51:28] or a place where all the video exists, [51:32] And so I think we were right. But what happened was by answering that question, [51:36] The link out question all of a sudden became super easy. We value consistency over conferences. We definitely don't need to link out. In fact, we should make a whole bunch of other decisions as well. So we went and at the time we used to, this was the days of flash players and so on. We embedded other people's players on YouTube. We stopped doing that as well. Probably the most famous decision we made was with the iPhone. As I mentioned earlier, the iPhone, when it first shipped, had no app store. And so they built all the first few apps, including YouTube. [52:02] And so here we were a few years later, iPhone, most popular phone on the planet. And the YouTube app on the iPhone was built by a team at Apple. [52:11] And they had not been able to keep up with what we were doing. Almost half the catalog didn't play back on the iPhone. They were missing a bunch of features and so on. So I drove down to Cupertino and I sat down with Scott and Phil and said, hey, we're going to have to...

[52:23] take back the YouTube app. And they said, I don't understand. Why would you do that? Like your default distribution on, you know, as far as they were concerned, the most important operating system in the world. Why would you do that? You're going to have to like rebuild all this from scratch. And, you know, it just seems like a really bad choice. [52:38] And I said, no, no, it's actually quite an easy choice. We value consistency over comprehensiveness. We would much rather be on fewer phones with a more consistent experience than [52:46] Then beyond all of them with an inconsistent experience, so this is a choice we're making, and it worked out fairly well. So this decision, the modern family question, [52:53] ended up becoming named as the example for a term called "Eiden Questions". So "Eiden Questions", it's not a German game show. It is a made-up word. [53:03] And it's named after a math concept called eigenvectors. [53:07] And the math is not really necessary, but for people who are curious, go back to linear algebra. Eigenvectors are in a multidimensional space. They're the most discriminating vectors of the vectors in that space, the dimensions. [53:20] of that space. It's a concept that gets used a lot in machine learning and so on, but actually the math doesn't really matter. The Aiden question, the simplest definition of Aiden question is the question that when answered, [53:31] also answers the most subsequent questions. [53:35] It's a very simple idea that when you sit down and you say, hey, here's all these questions we got to answer. [53:39] How do we all usually rank? Like sometimes we rank them just by what order we came up with. Sometimes we rank them by importance, like which is the most impactful decision we're going to make. [53:48] But this methodology says don't rank them that way. Rank them, like you said, Chess, he's thinking about leverage, same idea.

[53:54] Rank them by which ones would eliminate the most other questions on the list. So you take that list. You said, should we link out to Modern Family? Should we own the YouTube iPhone app? Should we do... Those were all really hard questions to answer. But it turns out if you answer just one question, do we value consistency over comprehensiveness? You answer all the others. They all of a sudden become very simple. And so this idea of IGN questions became part of our vocabulary. It became a clear ritual for YouTube. What is the IGN question here at Jays for Code as well? [54:24] but that's the basic idea [54:26] Amazing. What a baller move with Apple. [54:28] And it's a pretty scary move. Yeah. Yeah. But I was just going to say, I think YouTube's probably in the top 510 most downloaded apps. So it worked out. [54:37] You know, we'd go to that meeting [54:39] I bring along the product manager for the iPhone app, again, I'm Andre Droncheff. [54:45] And he's the one having to [54:47] explain what we're going to do and so on. [54:49] and it's a hard, contentious meeting. And as we're leaving the meeting, [54:52] He says, hey, can I get a selfie with Bill and Scott? Andre, what are you doing? [54:59] And so this great picture of him, like with us asking for, you know, take this back. And he's clearly he's very starstruck. I mean, there's a lot of people who view it as like. [55:08] Apple would do a better job of building the YouTube app than us. Like, who are we to tell them to not do that? Of course, you know, in retrospect, that was that was. [55:15] Silly way to think about it. Wow. I would do the same thing. [55:20] It's amazing. Who is this person? Because that's awesome. I love that as a leader, you bring the PM of the team working on it versus just, you know, the big, big shots at the top.

[55:29] Yeah, Andre, he's now a founder. He started a company called Optic, which is basically building content ID for NFTs, which is a... [55:36] much needed thing in the Web3 world. The team building it, it was that meeting I brought in, I brought my partnerships lead, and I brought the Eng lead that was covering the area too. I think that some of it is [55:48] If I had to be honest, some of it is like they really wanted to come and be with Apple. Some of it was like, for my own sake, I kind of wanted some backup. [55:57] I'm about to make this kind of bold ass. And it could have been... [56:01] I mean, to Apple's credit, I mean, they could have been, you know, [56:05] pretty bad about it. I mean, it could have like not allowed us on the store and, and, and so on. And they, they said, okay, well, you know, we don't like it, but we understand your choice. You have to know that you're going to start from zero. We're not giving you a single download, uh, uh, for free. You're going to have to start from zero and we will break the current app. [56:21] What have you agreed upon date? [56:22] And the negotiation was, can you please just tell those people that there's a new app? And so that's what we negotiated out of it. [56:28] And they eventually did that and that was fine. And in the end, YouTube is now one of the top download apps on iTunes, I think. [56:36] I mean, he... [56:37] it was like six months after launch, we had like 80% share on like almost like everybody downloaded the app, visited him and said, it kind of ended up not being that much of a comprehensiveness, uh, uh, [56:49] choice, but it was a clearly hard decision. Made much easier by asking the right item question first. [56:55] Wow. Speaking of Viking questions, are there other examples of Viking questions that come to mind to make this even more concrete in people's minds? I don't know if that's the right way to frame it or is it more just when you have a list of questions, look for the one that will answer the most. How do you kind of operationalize this concept?

[57:12] You know, there's lots of them. I mean, for Coda, the eigenquestion... [57:16] The most conceptual eigenquestion for Coda was, [57:20] We use Align a lot for Coda. That Coda allows anyone to make a doc as powerful as an app. [57:24] You could reverse that statement and say, allow anyone to make an app as easily as a duck. [57:30] And those two sound similar, but they're not. They're actually quite different statements. And so our most commonly debated eigenquestion is, [57:38] are we more committed [57:39] to being a doc or being an app. And which way we want people... If people are going to misunderstand Coda, would we rather them perceive it as a document or perceive it as an app? And we decided on doc, which is actually... And the way I cemented that decision when we made it was I named the company that way. Coda is a doc backwards. I said, well, this is going to be a... [58:00] We're definitely not revisiting this one. This is a Coda is a doc first. That's a good example. I mean, by the way, I would say, [58:08] Iden questions is a term that... [58:12] You know, a guy could resonance and so on, but it's a hard technique. It's not always easy to know how to do it. And one of the things... [58:19] I get asked a lot, is it a skill you can learn? I absolutely think it's a skill you can learn. It's a thing that once you observe it, get better at it, you can learn it, but it's not easy to learn it. And one of my observations about learning skills like these is, [58:31] you want to learn them in non-pressure filled environment. To use an analogy, if you were trying to learn a sport or learn an instrument, so imagine if you never did practice.

[58:42] Every time you played basketball was in a real basketball game and every time you played the piano was in a recital. You probably would never get better. And I think one of the troubles with that concept like I can questions is we tend to only practice it in real world scenarios that are high stakes. [58:58] And so one of the one of the things I encourage people to do is to practice. I can questions in completely almost frivolous situations. So I interview a question I ask, which I think maybe we'll get to this a little bit later as well. [59:11] But it's a very simple question, and it's a coded Icon question test. [59:16] And the question is... [59:18] A group of scientists have invented a teleportation device. [59:24] They've hired you, Lenny. [59:25] to be their sort of business counterpart, bring this to market, product counterpart. This question actually worked well for any role. Let's say you could be a product manager for this thing, bring it to market. [59:34] Um, [59:35] And what do you do? [59:37] That's the whole question. Usually people will start asking a bunch of questions and say, "Well, tell me more about this device. What does it do? How does it work? Is it big? Is it small? Is it fast? Does it disintegrate things or not? Does it need a receiver and a sender? Is it safe?" All these different questions come out. [59:55] And at some point, I'll just let those questions come out. [59:58] And at some point I'll say, OK, nice, nice job generating all the questions. Turns out the scientists, they kind of hate talking to people. [1:00:05] and they're kind of annoyed by all your questions. [1:00:07] And so they've decided that they will answer only two of your questions. [1:00:12] And after that, they expect a plan.

[1:00:14] What two questions do you ask? [1:00:16] And interestingly, all of a sudden, like the sharp product managers, engineers, basically every role. [1:00:23] they very quickly find what are the two [1:00:26] one or two eigenquestions on this topic. And it's no right answer, but I'll tell you, like one of my favorite ones is because their product manager said, okay, if I had to ask two questions, the two questions I'd ask, [1:00:36] One is, is it safe enough for humans or not? [1:00:39] And that 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, just tell me, is it safe enough for humans or not? And the second one is, is it more expensive CapEx or OPEX? Is it more expensive to buy them or to run them? [1:00:54] And then he took those two questions and he said, like, Jeff, with those two questions, [1:00:58] I can form these quadrants. You can say, oh, it's safe enough for humans. [1:01:02] and it's cheaper to, they're very cheap to buy but expensive to run. [1:01:06] then you probably run them like human fax machines. You put them everywhere you can. [1:01:10] and you say, "Hey, look, it's expensive to use, but you'll have the ability to teleport anywhere you want, and this is how we can run it." If the other hand, they're very expensive to buy, [1:01:20] but very, but cheap to run, you probably have to place them very strategically, in which case, what you probably do is replace airports. Because airports are pretty strategically placed in places where people are trying to 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 very costly ways. And people come up with, do you do the most expensive things? Is teleporting people's

[1:01:50] But these two questions kind of get to the heart of it. The question's totally made up, like no teleportation device exists, at least not yet. And I find that people's ability to learn the method is significantly higher if it's low stakes. That question, by the way, if you ask a kid that question, [1:02:07] the new teleportation device, you get to ask two questions. Almost every kid [1:02:13] we'll quickly get to two pretty good item questions. Kids are incredibly good at simplifying these things down. It's actually a skill we like... [1:02:20] removed from ourselves. I'll hear candidates tell me things like, I guess I would ask them what size it is. [1:02:26] And like, why would you ask them what's that? What decision is that going to allow you to make? [1:02:30] to know what size it is. [1:02:32] And, you know, sometimes they can explain it, sometimes not. Don't get hired. But actually, the thing I'd say about it is there are questions kind of everywhere. I mean, you can take any product out there. I'll do it with my kids a lot, and they'll say, [1:02:43] I was just riding with my younger daughter and she said, how come there's three gas stations in the same corner? [1:02:51] Why do people do that? That's a really insightful observation. [1:02:57] What's the other question? [1:02:58] How do you place a gas station? [1:02:59] And there's like a, you can almost take anything and say, what is the question that really drives this answer? [1:03:07] I love that. Do you [1:03:09] You actually still ask this question because you're sharing it and all the answers. [1:03:13] No, I don't. And I have a new one that I can't share. But it's a, and we've written about it. In fact, one of the big debates about publishing the iPhone questions thing is in order to bring this to life, I needed it.

[1:03:23] To answer your question, like, how do I? [1:03:24] how do I test this? How do I practice this? And like, it's much easier, like nobody can repeat the YouTube one. It's like, yeah, nobody has that choice sitting in front of them. So it's kind of a useless, it's entertaining, but it's a teaching tool. It's kind of useless because you can't, you can't really, [1:03:37] Go reinvent history and decide for conferences. And to sacrifice one [1:03:42] We sacrificed one. Yeah. [1:03:44] To pull on that thread further and kind of dive a little deeper into evaluating talent and product talent, I hear this is one of your superpowers. [1:03:51] And so I'd love to learn from you and what you've seen around how to evaluate talent. So you talked a little about interview questions you ask. [1:03:58] So maybe we can either go in that direction or just like what do you look for in people that you're hiring interviewing that maybe other people aren't? I have a technique for it. Let me show. I'll show a quick picture. We need to plug. [1:04:09] Yes, YouTube plug. You can, I mentioned it before the call, you can put video on Spotify now too. Spotify plug, all your platforms that you worked on. Now you can support my videos. [1:04:21] That's right. [1:04:22] So I'll talk through this diagram that has two axes, scope, this acronym PSHE, and this line. So I'll stop sharing and describe it and we can come back to it. But I'll tell a little bit of this technique sort of changed how I think about evaluating not only product talent, but it actually turns out you can use the same... [1:04:38] set of rules for evaluating basically every role. But I'll tell it from how you asked it about product talent. So 2011, [1:04:46] Larry Page took over at Google and [1:04:48] He made a bunch of changes to the company, mostly quite positive. And one of the ones he did was he moved us from being a functional organization to being a business unit organization. We called them product units, but roughly the same thing. And there were eight product units at Google, YouTube, and Search, and Ads, and Chrome, and Maps, and so on. And it was very positive. It's hard to believe that we were already like,

[1:05:09] 20,000 people were still functional, all of engineering, all of products unreported into the CEO. It just seems totally crazy with the breadth of products that we covered. [1:05:16] One of the downsides of it was, like in any functional business unit switch, is you lose some of that. [1:05:22] that what does the function mean and in particular things like what is a good product manager was a question we were at risk of losing. So a group of, at the time I was running product for YouTube, the group of the eight product leaders around the company got together and said, "Hey, we need to keep some level of consistency amongst how we think about what's a great product manager or it's all going to diverge and it's not going to mean anything anymore." [1:05:46] and [1:05:47] Actually, it's a fun aside. We did a ritual that I've repeated a few times, but it's not often enough. We said, so who's going to drive this process? And we did an election. I don't know why we do elections in the public world, but not in the private world. But it's actually quite effective. We used to do them in YouTube where we would elect into certain roles. And you got a one-year term, you give a little speech. [1:06:17] this challenge, keeping the product management function together at Google. [1:06:22] And the most obvious job we had to do was come up with a speech for the calibration committee. So Google does calibration a little bit different or promotion a little bit different than most companies. Most companies your boss decides to get promoted or not. At Google, there's a committee that decides. It's supposed to be a committee that doesn't actually...

[1:06:39] work directly with the person so they can be a little unbiased and so on. And it gets done. The ritual was to do it in a hotel near the airport here in San Francisco. And everybody get in these different rooms. And there was always a... [1:06:50] a speech given at the beginning that used to be given by Jonathan Rosenberg who ran product for Google for many years and now it had to be given by somebody. So I'm going to give this speech now I got to figure out what the hell am I going to say? What's a good product manager? [1:07:01] And as I was going through this, I decided to run this little exercise. So this group of eight product leaders. [1:07:07] We took the level guides. We had a level guide for product managers, every company does. [1:07:11] And we took it. [1:07:12] We printed out a sheet of paper, cut it into little slices, one per level, and we cut off the title and the number. And I handed him out and I said, can you reverse identify what level you're holding? [1:07:22] And turns out [1:07:23] nobody could do it. And it's not easy to do. The level guide had been kind of added to over time and not really that refined. And so it's full of all sorts of things that were [1:07:36] you know, whatever that at that time was the priority of the team, they stuck it in the level bank. And so it would say things like this person can manage a medium sized project, [1:07:46] and they interview at least three people a week, and they always send their notes out on time, and their expense reports are always filed. And it'd be like, oh, that's a director. And it's like, yeah, and, you know, just whatever we were trying to incent was sort of stuck in this thing. But we noticed that if you took all these sheets of paper and laid them out side by side, you could order them by exactly one statement, which was one that corresponded to scope.

[1:08:12] So there's some word in there that was an escalating adjective that mostly correlated to how big is a thing you run. [1:08:19] And so we decided, OK, well, we're going to standardize. We're just going to focus on making that clear. And so we said we're going to define scope and so that we all kind of use it the same way. And we came up with some some stopping points. And basically we said, you own a feature, you own a group of features, you own a sub area of a product, you own multiple sub areas of product, you own an entire product or you own multiple products, you own a product line. [1:08:42] And that's going to be how we think about scope. [1:08:44] go forth and evaluate your teams. [1:08:47] We have the next meeting a couple weeks later, and everybody comes back upset. [1:08:50] Like this didn't work at all. Like, what would happen? And said, well, [1:08:54] The search team is super mad at the ads team because search is like one product, but the entire thing is one product. The ads team, they went and invented all these products because there's like every little thing you do in the ads platform has a SKU, has a P&L, has a... [1:09:13] They said the scope. [1:09:14] is actually an input, not an output. Like we were talking to a manager and said, well, this person should get promoted. They've managed a huge scope. And then they would say, but you gave them that scope. [1:09:23] We should be judging you, not the person. How do we judge what they're doing with the scope? It's actually very different. And the third issue, [1:09:31] was in almost every team, some of our best people were working on things with odd scope. They were risky projects. We didn't yet know, is this thing going to work or not work? Is it might be canceled? And

[1:09:43] If we put in place a system that only rewarded scope, we would heavily disincent people from working on these riskier, more creative things. [1:09:51] So we're kind of stuck. And then we ended up, we went through lots of frameworks. We ended up telling us one called PSHE. And it comes from a mentor of mine, Mike Clark. [1:10:02] He was my boss at Microsoft for a number of years. [1:10:04] And it stands for problem, solution, how, execution. [1:10:09] ESHE. [1:10:10] And I will say it's a, um, I've tried many times to come up with a better acronym and I have not been able to come up with one. So it's push. That's the word. That's as good as I can get. But here's how it works good enough. Right. So push. That's all you have to remember. The, um, [1:10:24] It doesn't roll off the top, but maybe... I did better with eigenquestions, I think. But they have... [1:10:30] So here's how it works. So if you're sort of a junior product manager, what happens? You get handed a problem. [1:10:36] You get handed a solution. [1:10:37] You can handle the how, go talk to this person, write this document, run this meeting, so on. And all you have to do is execute, run that playbook. [1:10:45] And that's all we expect of it. [1:10:47] You can become a little more senior. We hand you a problem. We hand you a rough solution. You figure out the how. You figure out how are we going to organize this? What are the milestones? How are we going to get to market? How are we going to do the meetings? What are the rituals? All those things show up in the H. [1:11:03] At some point, we become a little more senior. We hand you a problem and you come back with the solutions. We judge you on the creativity and the effectiveness of the 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 or I think our issue is quality or I think our issue is whatever it might be.

[1:11:23] And that's sort of the pinnacle of this way of thinking about it. Now, just back to the picture for a moment. One of the interesting things that happened was that the teams went, [1:11:33] and they evaluated their teams on these two axes. And they end up with a sort of curve line between them. It's not linear as you work your way through. [1:11:42] And what happens is early in people's career, [1:11:45] They mostly sit at that eat point. You get to handle a problem, handle a solution, handle a how, and you just execute, and they gradually grow in scope. [1:11:52] Later in people's careers, similarly, you're at that key level, just do bigger and bigger products. It's like the job of being an entrepreneur or CEO or an owner or so on is just kind of do bigger and bigger projects. [1:12:03] But in the middle, [1:12:04] the slope changes. And all of a sudden, it's not really about scope, it's about PSEG. And there's a circle drawn here for what I like to call the trough of dissolution. [1:12:14] And the reason, I'll stop sharing so we can talk about it, but the [1:12:17] the [1:12:18] What happens in that phase, and I was talking to the calibration companies about this, the reason we follow the top of the solution is for the employee, for the person, [1:12:26] This is a confusing time. Everything about [1:12:29] leading up to this moment. [1:12:31] from high school and college, has been About Scope. [1:12:33] 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. I think that's very confusing. [1:12:41] To the calibrator, to the manager, it's also very confusing because all of a sudden, the difference, the way I put it 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 job that matters. And here's some language for how they do the job. And so PSHC became a very sticky way of thinking about it.

[1:12:58] It turns out that this way of evaluating people is actually not that specific to product management. It's really easy to see why you do the exact same thing for engineers and designers and so on. But to pick one that may not be as obvious, I'll pick salespeople. A very common thing people do with salespeople is they evaluate them based on photo attainment. [1:13:18] The easiest thing to do is take the salespeople and rank them by who hit their quota and who didn't. [1:13:23] You go ask the sales team who's the best salesperson. [1:13:27] And what you'll realize is they'll say quota attainment is just a signal for how good you negotiate your quota and pick the right territory. And they say, really, you want to know who's the best salesperson? They say, well, you know, so-and-so, I mean, she can sell anything. [1:13:39] and she can be in the region that's growing or the region is shrinking or the new product or the old product. And if you think about that terminology, it's very similar to PSHE thinking like this is the person [1:13:49] who can come into a new space, identify the right problems and solve them. That's what makes a really great salesperson. So it's become my framework for evaluating talent in all sorts of ways. And you might recognize a pattern of like being a great P thinker is very correlated with being good with item questions. [1:14:06] Can you spot the right problems? It's very similar to can you spot the right questions? Can you decide what's important? [1:14:12] And so that's been my main framework for VALU. [1:14:15] Wow. There's so much there. A couple of quick questions. Is this basically your calibration ladder framework for PMs at this point? And then is this also just like your interview guide, just like interviewed each of these pieces to level the person?

[1:14:29] Yeah, so it's definitely how we do our version of leveling is B-S-H-E. And we use a... [1:14:37] a set of Radford levels. Radford has this really interesting way of describing... [1:14:43] that as you grow in a profession, he uses an analogy of, uh, of someone, um, [1:14:49] of like a sailor [1:14:50] And that a junior sailor is like learning to tie knots and then you gradually can tie all the standard knots and then you can tie the advanced knots and so on. And so you kind of work your way up. And at some point, the way you're judged is you invented nylon. [1:15:01] and there's like this list between there. It's like a way to evaluate every role. It's very similar to PSHE. And so we sort of look at a kind of similar list. But yeah, basically all of our [1:15:12] All of our roles are evaluated on something that corresponds with PSHE. [1:15:17] And in terms of interviews, yeah, you look for the same thing. And so you and by the way, I should say. [1:15:23] Interviewing is one part of this. And you talk about interviewing, talk about calibration. There's one other really important one, which is reference checking. [1:15:30] And I think the best way to assess PSHE is actually through references. And so the most important guide we write [1:15:37] isn't the interview guide. It's the one we call this person's references. What do you ask to actually get at these questions? Because people can often confuse them. Just take product managers as [1:15:48] We all know some really amazing age level park managers. [1:15:52] And one of the reasons, one of the homeworks of an HL product manager is that [1:15:57] Their counterparts usually loved them.

[1:15:59] And he'll say things like, [1:16:00] oh my gosh, a person runs such efficient meetings and like everybody, all communication is always clear. [1:16:05] Haps is always buttoned up. Execs know what we're doing. The market knows what we're doing. Sales know what we're doing. That's a great age. And then you'll ask them a question of, [1:16:13] Okay, so... [1:16:15] when you're deciding which problem to solve, [1:16:17] Who is the leader of that and are they picking the right problems? [1:16:20] Or when there's a VARP problem, [1:16:22] Who is regularly coming up with the best solutions for them? Who do you turn to? Who is the most obvious person to turn to to say, like, this is a really hard problem? What's the right solution? An amazing number of people will tell you, no, they run a great meeting. [1:16:34] But like actually solving the problem, a designer does that. Or like that, or the what are the problems? And then the CEO kind of tells us what to do. That's like not one person is really good at it. Yeah, I'm not sure we're solving the right problem. But boy, you've run a great meeting. And it's not meant to diminish any of that. I mean, we spent a while talking about rituals, which mostly happen at that age level. So I don't think it's unimportant. [1:16:53] But it's actually quite hard to assess an interview, but incredibly easy to assess in a reference check. And I think getting good at that is really important. [1:17:01] You may have mentioned this, but what's the question there? Is there a question that you could recommend? The absolute ideal case is you get to the person that you do the reference check with and you don't even tell them who you're asking about. [1:17:13] You say, when you think of your teams, [1:17:16] Who is best at that? And this obviously only works in cases where you have a pretty deep relationship with the person you're getting reference from. [1:17:24] You can't always do that. [1:17:27] But ideally, you want to kind of mimic that behavior. One of the things I think that's hard about reference checks is,

[1:17:33] people have [1:17:34] They have sort of perverse incentives in a reference check. They're not really... [1:17:39] Nobody, some of it is [1:17:41] is for good reason, some of it is for bad reason. People generally don't like [1:17:46] you know criticizing people and they also like feel judge themselves [1:17:50] And they don't want, there's legal reasons that things can blow back and so on. And so what I try really hard to do is to draw contrasts. [1:17:59] So you try to say things [1:18:01] So there's a couple of techniques I've used for this. In the best case, [1:18:04] You say... [1:18:05] I'm not going to even tell you what I'm asking about, but when you think about this team, [1:18:09] Who regularly identifies what problems they should focus on? Who is most reliable at coming up with the solutions to the hardest problems? And you kind of work your way through it. The other way I like to do it is to provide contrast to give the person an out to not make it obvious to them that I have this ranking. [1:18:25] And so I'll say things like when you think about this person and I'll give you I'll give you four different personas. You know, someone who's like regularly coming up with the problems that the team should be focused on. Someone who like, you know, given a set of problems is constantly like solving them in this like really creative way. The person that is just really good at getting a team moving and like and or the person who can take a playbook and execute it with high precision and high quality. And I won't tell them that I have a qualitative judgment. [1:18:50] that one is better than the other, [1:18:52] But you want them because you just want your reference check. [1:18:55] to talk and you want them to say what's on their mind of, you know, you want to give them an opening to not feel like, [1:19:02] They're judging.

[1:19:03] obviously like another question I always ask people is, um, would you hire this person again or how excitedly would you hire this person again? [1:19:11] I always ask them what questions should I have asked that didn't. Another key technique for reference checks is, [1:19:17] you see people, once they start talking, they'll reveal what they really feel. And often the little things will come out. [1:19:24] But for this particular thing, if I want to know where they stand on this axis, don't tell people. [1:19:29] what you value. [1:19:30] By the way, I will say, [1:19:32] I value P over S over H over E. I've seen many companies that would reverse that scale. [1:19:38] By the way, there's industries where it's very required. You don't want a bunch of people running around and constantly telling you to solve some different problem. I just need people that can do this job that we give them super, super well. It depends a bit what your personality is and what your company's culture is and so on. [1:19:54] that unbelievable that I might value the E over the P. And anybody who knows me, that's probably not true. But you can, for a reference check, you can probably not give that away. [1:20:04] Wow, that was gold. I hadn't heard these reference check notes. [1:20:08] insights. And so I'm really happy we got to that. Maybe one last question on reference checks. How often do you find that a reference check leads to you not hiring someone? [1:20:16] Just like ballparker? All the time. And I will say, I try to do them as early in the process as a practical process. [1:20:25] if it's possible. I mean, [1:20:26] Because I think it's actually... [1:20:28] The worst feeling for an interviewee to go through a process and then get dinged at the reference check stage. [1:20:33] It's a really crappy experience for the candidate.

[1:20:35] And obviously you have to be careful about not ruining anything for them. You can't always do the reference check as early as you can. When you're inside a company, when you're inside Google or Facebook or so on, you can generally do them even before you interview. It's sort of an expectation of like, we're going to hear a little bit about people in that process. And I generally value the reference check over interview signals. If I had the stack rank in interviews, what is the best signal? [1:20:57] the reference check is the top of the list. Those people, you know, they work with this person for, you know, sometimes for years. Like their knowledge, what you're going to get out of 30 minutes of artificial scenarios, it's just like never going to compare what a good reference check will give you. [1:21:12] And then the second best thing I value is anything that feels like a real work exercise. And that and which is also like that even that is hard because some people like, [1:21:22] their skill set doesn't naturally lead to a compressed time work exercise. But we do a thing for basically all our roles where at the start of the interview loop, the candidate presents [1:21:31] to everyone on the loop and we invite some other people in the company to attend to. For a while, it was open to the whole company. Now we're big enough for that. It's not practical. But the original is very simple. At the beginning of the loop, the person presents. [1:21:43] And generally for most roles, there's a exercise that they do, but about half the time is spent on them presenting whatever they want. They can talk about themselves. They can teach us something. And then another half is like we've given them a prompt, something that we want to direct. One of the things that I think... [1:21:59] When you're doing interviewing, one way to think about it, I call it home court, away court, neutral court. You want interviews to balance in all those different spheres. So like, you know, a common mistake people make is they do all questions in home court.

[1:22:13] "Hey, if you're joining Airbnb, what would you do about X?" [1:22:16] And what is the candidate going to say? They clearly can't be as thoughtful as you. They haven't thought about it nearly as much as you have. So really what you're testing is, did they come to the same answer that we did? [1:22:27] which is a pretty crappy way to judge someone. That's why home court questions tend to be tough. You have to be very careful about how you do them. Away court questions can also be tough. This person, you say, how did you solve this problem? And they say, well, we did this thing. You don't really know, was that like, [1:22:41] Was that problem actually hard? Was it somebody else was telling them what to do? Or they just like not telling you the whole story of what happened? [1:22:49] And so you try really hard to make most of our interviews are done neutral. So the vast teleporter question is a very neutral question. You don't know anything about Kodak. I don't have to know anything about Airbnb or wherever. I can just ask you this question. [1:23:01] But this one thing, the presentation is the away court question. It's the, you now have an opportunity to talk about yourself in this, in this new way. And it's super interesting what people do. I mean, I've seen people use that time. I often tell people it's the brag session. So this is like, [1:23:17] And for product managers, we do it for everyone, but it's like recruiters, [1:23:21] salespeople, marketers, we tell them, you know, we're going to go through this whole interview process. And at most companies, you talk to six different people and six little segments. At the end of the day, you say, gosh, I really wish they had learned this about me. [1:23:36] And I tell them, don't leave this with that feeling. What do you want us to know about you? Like all our questions are in some senses like we're trying to lower bound you, like how bad could this be? I want you to upper bound us. I want you to tell us what's really amazing here.

[1:23:51] And so we'll have the presenter go through that process. [1:23:54] And what they choose to talk about is very important. How they choose to present it is very important. But I view it as upper bounding. But if I had the stack rank in interviewing, what do I look for? Referent check at the top. [1:24:04] work product and presentation next, and then all the interviews. When they disagree, that's the order we judge in. [1:24:11] For sure. I feel like you have five books in you that you need to write. [1:24:15] on so many of these topics. This is such good stuff. I wish I could keep going. I know you have to run. [1:24:21] So we have this final lightning round. So I'm going to ask you five questions. There's one at the end I didn't tell you about ahead of time. So it's going to be a surprise. And so I'm just going to ask you these quick questions. Let me know what comes to mind. [1:24:32] Okay. [1:24:33] First question, just what are what are two, three books that you find that you recommend most to other people? [1:24:37] Oh, pulling out the bookshelf. Pull out the bookshelf. One I already said and we talked about, so this would take two of the slots. [1:24:44] The next one on my list is a Switch by Chip and Dan. He taught a change thing when it changes art. The other one, this is probably a surprising one. It's about Understanding Comics by Scott McFarlane. Oh, wow. Super fun book. It's a comic book about comic books. And you don't have to like comic books at all to love this book. It's basically the sort of starting point is overtime communication has drifted at two extremes. So one is we've gotten very good at written form. [1:25:10] And the other is we've gotten very good at art, single pieces of art. And comics are the hybrid. They are drawing mixed with writing. Sometimes I think he calls it... [1:25:20] Oh, God, he had a good term for it that I'm now forgetting. But he describes comics really well, and he goes through the actual reasoning of why comics are structured the way they are. And one of the reasons it's so important to me is, and you can probably tell from how we talked about different things, is often a diagram that crystallizes something. The art of...

[1:25:37] storytelling, diagramming, so on, I think is so critical for basically any part of life. [1:25:42] And this book is just so thought-provoking on how to do it. Understanding Comics. Understanding Comics. Wow. Good choice. Okay. [1:25:50] Favorite recent movie or TV show? [1:25:52] Okay, a couple that come to mind. Only Murders in the Building is a really fun one. And my family got really into the Marvel series during the pandemic. It's a WandaVision series. [1:26:03] If anybody hasn't seen that, if you're not into... [1:26:05] superhero stuff and so on, which I'm not really... [1:26:08] I'm actually more of a DC Comics person. I like Superman. But WandaVision is one of the best pieces of art [1:26:14] that I've seen done in a very long time. Very well done, Joe. [1:26:18] I feel like with that show, I had to like, I gave up initially. I'm like, what the hell is this? I know. And then it gets it gets good. [1:26:24] It gets good. Yeah. And on the flip side, only murderers in the building. I don't know if you've seen the second season yet, but I'm just like, I'm done with it. I don't, I'm just tired of it now. I don't know what they're doing. [1:26:33] Oh, yeah. We're only one episode into the second season, so we'll see. Okay. Good luck. Good luck. The first season was so good. So good. [1:26:42] And it's all about podcasters. [1:26:44] It's like so meta around podcasters. Oh, man. Okay, good. Good segue. Okay, favorite interview question. You may have already answered this. The teleporter one is definitely my favorite. My second favorite one, if I was going to give you a different one, [1:26:57] is I have a series of questions around... [1:27:01] Let me pull it here so I give you what the real question is. But basically around... [1:27:07] A dashboard prompt.

[1:27:09] And it's the starting point of the question is pick a product. I didn't say your favorite technical product. And the constraint is it can't be something that you built. [1:27:19] worked on or competed with. It's got to be in a space that you're not an expert in. And I generally ask people why, which is actually a really interesting passion test. [1:27:27] And then I'll ask people, [1:27:28] design the one-page dashboard for that product. You're the CEO, general manager, whatever you run that product. [1:27:35] what's on the dashboard, why? It's an interesting eigenquestionee type question of like, can you tell what's important for this product or not? [1:27:43] And then I ask them to basically redesign the product. And the way I do it is you've been hired by a competitor and [1:27:51] to design a MeToo version of that product. I'm going to leave aside for a moment that why you would want to build a MeToo version. What is the bare minimum what you need to build? [1:28:00] And then I tell them, you ran out of resources, you get a quarter of the scope and a quarter of the time and a quarter of the team. What do you actually bill? [1:28:10] And then I get down to the other side of like, you've decided you can differentiate in only one place. What do you do to differentiate? So a series of questions that are basically a form of PSHE. [1:28:20] but just formed around a new problem space that lets people wander a little bit. I've seen some really amazing things. [1:28:26] answers that. There's also a lot of biking question elements to this sequence. Yes. [1:28:31] Excellent. [1:28:33] Who else in the industry do you respect as a thought leader who comes to mind? [1:28:37] Other than you, I have to write a puzzle company.

[1:28:41] By the way, your newsletter is one of my top reads. I think that yours and Ben Thompson from Stratectory are two of the [1:28:50] two of the ones that [1:28:51] I think you both have a very natural instinct for... [1:28:54] for writing and synthesizing things that people are feeling without [1:28:59] Um, [1:29:00] with a clarity that's really helpful. So I really appreciate that. I appreciate that. [1:29:06] I think the rituals process exposed me to some really amazing leaders. Talk about Ariana. I always learn a lot when I when I talk to Ariana. Shira Stoshi has contributed a bunch. I think he's really helpful. And it's like is I can't believe he basically had no Twitter followers at the beginning of the pandemic. And like his tweets are just total gold. And this is so insightful and all put together. [1:29:27] Fiji Simo is someone that I learned a lot from. She now runs Instacart. [1:29:31] Daniel from Spotify, Daniel Act, I think, is a... [1:29:34] He's got this really unique way of thinking about the world. And he's also one of the few people that can like hold a very long term view and a very short term view at the same time. Fantastic ethics. I'd also say my entire board read Hoffman. [1:29:50] Amon Taneja, Mamon Hamid, Quinn Clark, Sarah Kuo. I think they're all amazing. And I'm super lucky to have a group of people I can call with questions. Awesome. Someone's going to have a lot of work in these show notes. We'll have that list. Okay, final question. What's your go-to karaoke song or dance move at a wedding? A karaoke song is If I Had a Million Dollars by The Barenaked Ladies. And it's a...

[1:30:15] If people don't remember the song, part of the reason it's my favorite is I'm a very mediocre singer and you don't have to be that good a singer. And everybody can sing along so you can kind of bring everybody into it. And it's just such a fun song to sing. [1:30:27] if I had a million dollars. You're as thoughtful about your karaoke songs as you are about everything else you're doing. Shashir, thank you so much for being on this podcast. You've set a really high bar for CEO guests, so we'll see who comes up next. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out or learn more? And how can listeners be useful to you? [1:30:44] Okay, I'll give the same answer to both. [1:30:46] Well, I'm easy to find one of the benefits of having a not very common name. It's easy to find me on basically every platform. So you can find me on Twitter. It's easy to DM me, csharic.io, get right to me. [1:30:57] But in terms of being useful to me and also finding me, I would highly recommend joining the Richel's Great Teams brain test. [1:31:04] And I think it's a pretty fun experience to get a chance to contribute to a book like that. And hopefully if you made it this far in the episode, then you probably are interested. So I think you'll find it interesting. And I'm having a lot of fun with the people on that brain trust. [1:31:18] Amazing. I'm definitely going to join. [1:31:20] Thank you. All right. Thank you so much, Lenny. That was really fun.

[1:31:44] See you in the next episode.