Lenny DistilledStrategy → Vision & Mission
One thing that's really interesting is that our impact and our business goals are in service of our mission, which is to seek the truth and help people understand the world, not the other way around.
I think there's a trap in getting away from your core purpose as a company. Our core purpose is economic empowerment. Anything that serves that purpose, we should encourage and we should invest in, but if we're just purely looking at dollars versus dollars, then that's pulling us off that purpose.
I really can't remember where I heard this, but it really stuck with me: PMs own the why of a product. It doesn't have to be that the PM comes up with the idea, but I do think the why is something that I really always hold the PM uniquely responsible for.
There are really no new jobs, it's just the fact is we get better at them.
When you're a product manager, you're involved again in driving specific metrics like engagement or subscribers, but you're also trying to help stories find their real audience in ways that trigger just this whole different side of mission and purpose driven impact.
At the most basic level, I would say that our product is our journalism, which we then marry with a really compelling and useful user experience, in a way that helps people really act on our journalism so that they can understand and engage with the world around them.
I think it's super important that founders see a line of sight to work on this for ... I think my rule of thumb is a decade, just do you see yourself working on this for a decade?
We shape our tools. Then after, our tools shape us.
Step one, build one of the world's most valuable companies and step two, do the most good we can do. And in our early days I thought I'd do step one and then step two and realize that actually step one can fuel step two and step two can fuel step one.
I think it's hard to come up with a great strategy if you've only been working in an area for six months. Especially things like this, they're super nuanced.
To really set the new purpose for it, which was this is not a springboard for other products. This is not a traffic jumpstart, it's not an upsell feed. It's really about people that matter, talking about things that I care about professionally.
We called it, not even a side project, we called it an experiment. And that framing I think, is for me, has always been helpful because an experiment is really not about success... it's really to learn.
Your job is to understand what the CEO's vision is and what they care about, again, sort of how they think about things and figure out how to operationalize that in a way that results in the best possible manifestation of it in the form of product.