How To Win Friends & Influence Decisions (Julie Zhuo) | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024

Wow, I didn't realize there was actually a campfire here. This is very cozy. Hello, everyone. So I'm going to gaze into the haze here and ask for some audience participation, because the title of my talk is how to Win Friends and influence Decisions. So first, how many of you have had to influence a decision in the last week or try to influence a decision? So back in my previous life as a design leader, I really thought that my job was to influence. Design is about storytelling. It's about trying to have everyone else see what the future is and influence people towards it. Then I thought one day, if I become a founder and I've got my own company, I can just tell people what to do. Then it turns out I did that, and in fact, I actually have to influence more than ever. So all of you who think your job, you're going to get out of the job of influencing, unfortunately, I'm here to tell you that is not the case. But since I have you all here and you are an amazing group of very talented, senior experienced product leaders, I'm going to ask for your help. You see, I have a prioritization question and I've got three options for what our incredible team here should do. Behind door number one, we've got an infra rewrite, which the engineers have been clamoring for. Door number two, all the designers are saying our onboarding experience really sucks, and so we gotta. We gotta redo it. And behind door number three, our CEO has been talking to all of their other founder friends, and Genai is the thing we got to add a new feature. So, friends, how many of you think we should do the info rewrite? Show of hands. I can tell which of you have an engineering background from this. Okay, Redesign the on onboarding experience. All right, all right. How about that differentiated Genai feature? We've been inspired by Claire's talk from before. How many of you know that I'm about to lead with a fourth slide that tells you guys, this is really not the question? So, yes, you know what? It is pretty hard to prioritize something like this. I feel like I'm constantly, every single week in discussions that sound similar to that. And the reality, of course, is hard because there are so many variables and all sorts of questions and things that come into every single prioritization decision. So we're going to put that aside for now. What I want to talk about in this talk is actually what is a good process that we can take that gets us from. Look, I have a strong opinion because I'm sure many of you here probably did have an inkling and in all of your influence and prioritization decisions, you probably do have a strong opinion. How do we get from that to that opinion actually shapes us towards a better outcome. So it's going to be a simple, foolproof, five step process. Ready? So step one is very simple. Let us draw a circle. So do it with me now. Let's draw a circle. What do I mean by that? Well, I love this story and this quote, this Bedouin quote, because I think it really encapsulates this picture, which is when it's just me at home with my brother, it's me against my brother. But when my cousins come over, it's me and my brother against the cousins. And then if the other neighborhood kids come on over and they're going to challenge us to something, it's me, my brother and my cousins against that group. What I love about this is it illustrates we get to choose where we draw the circle. Do we draw the circle around ourselves? Is it I need to convince you that my idea here is the right one or are we going to draw the circle more broadly? Now, no matter who it is that you are disagreeing with and you're on totally separate pages with and you're trying to convince your company there is a circle around you, which is, hey, we all work at this company and because we work at this company, we all care about the company winning. In fact, if the company wins, we hit our goals, we make a lot of money. Rising Tide lifts all boats. And so there is always a way to draw a circle where now it is you and the person in the circle against whatever it is that is the problem or the goal. And so the lines as you can use here is just always, always, always start with that. Always start with, look, what we really want is to make sure that we make a great product that our customers love. So now let's talk about the various ideas or it is just really important that we can achieve our revenue targets because otherwise we're not going to get that round of funding or whatever terrible thing is going to happen. So let's orient around how we're going to best do that. And I think it's so important. It's not just these lines, it's the mentality that we have. If you go into a meeting thinking, I need to convince this person, I'm right, you've just drawn the circle around yourself. But if you go in and you say, okay, we're both in the circle together a lot of this becomes so much more natural and easy. And the energy, I promise you, is going to be different. Step number two. So we've drawn the circle. Step number two, assume that everyone is seeing the truth. What do I mean by that? So this is a story that I think about, and I kid you not, I think about this probably three times a week, which is the parable of the five blind men and the elephant. And so the story goes, there are five blind men, and they saunter into the woods, and they encounter an elephant for the first time. And so each of them is like, this is our opportunity. We can really get to know this elephant. So the first man says, he goes up and touches the elephant. He goes, I know what an elephant is. The elephant is rough and hard like a tree trunk. And then the second blind man goes up and he touches elephant. He's like, you are totally wrong. Totally wrong. The elephant feels like leather. And third blind man goes, and like, you guys are both ridiculous. The elephant is like a rope. I actually forgot what the fourth and fifth blind man said, but I think you get the gist of the story Now. All of us who are blessed with eyesight, we can see. You know what? They're all right. They are all seeing some version of the elephant because. Because the ear is like leather and the legs are like a tree trunk and the tail is like a rope. But it's also the case that none of them are completely right. They all see truth, but they don't see the whole truth. And whenever we disagree, this is usually what is happening. We're all seeing some version of the truth, but it's not put together in a way that lets us cohesively understand it. And of course, this is pretty obvious because a lot of times, look, we do have different experiences. We have different roles. If you ask a designer to evaluate a piece of work, they go straight to, well, what is the customer going to think? Is it easy to understand? Does it feel aesthetically pleasing? If you talk to a salesperson about the work, they're going to go straight into, like, what does this mean for our revenue targets? Everyone's got a different perspective. And it is often the product leader's job to hold these different perspectives and to be able to see the truth that is encapsulated in each of these different disciplines. And of course, it's not just, again, between product managers or product leaders. You also see this right? Some team is trying to optimize for growth and retention, and some other team is trying to optimize for revenue, and they're going to be at odds because sometimes the best thing for growth is not the best thing for revenue. But instead of being like, I gotta convince them, I gotta convince them that they're wrong, just acknowledge and put on the table the fact that we do see, we all see truth, but we see a version of it. And it is our job to acknowledge that and to do our best to put these versions of the truth together towards the greater good. And I love just being able to acknowledge that in the beginning of what is likely going to be us discussing a different perspective. Look, it really does seem like we see things differently, but we all have something valuable, so let's just put that on the table. Or you can also sometimes call it out in advance so you are a designer so you more easily can spot usability issues, while I can more easily spot the places in which usability or pricing are going to come into conflict. But just acknowledge what everyone brings to the table and that helps them feel heard and helps them see, okay, now that we've realized that we all do see something valuable, we can more easily see everyone else's perspective. So far, we've drawn the circle. We have acknowledged that everyone sees some truth. This is where the fun part begins. Step three is let us be like detectives and uncover where each of us sees the truth. I'm going to move straight to the lines that you can use because I think that these are two very, very powerful questions. So now that you and I are both aligned that we want us to provide a great customer experience while hitting our revenue targets, what would we have to both what would have to be true for us to believe that we should do feature A? Or what would have to be true for us to generally agree that feature B matters more? Another way of asking the question is if I am advocating for A and you know it and you are advocating for B, is to ask the question of, hey, well, if you're advocating for B, what would convince you that that A is actually better for the goal that we both aligned on in the beginning? So let's go back to those questions we had at the beginning. Info Rewrite. Why might info Rewrite be actually the most important project for us to tackle? Well, if our performance is really degraded, let's say we have a lot of customers and our performance has been degrading and we're very concerned that if the performance doesn't get better, our customers are going to churn. That would be bad. Both you and I don't want Churn customers that would be a disaster. Or let's say we're about to add. We assume that we're going to do a big marketing push, we're going to add a bunch of new customers and the product is so buggy that we're worried that we're not going to make a good impression and they're not going to stick around. That would be bad. Or maybe the reason is just simply it's so difficult to add new changes to our code base that all of our engineers are really upset and morale is horrible and they're all going to rage quit on us. Now, again, these are extreme examples, but I think that actually talking about the extremes is one tactic that brings everyone else along because we can always agree on the extremes. And if we can agree on extremes, what we do is we start putting the prioritization question as something on the table where we're on the same side and we're just trying to figure out what's the best balance, right? So, okay, let's agree on extremes. That would both be bad. If these things happen, we should do the infant rewrite. But what about redesigning onboarding? Well, onboarding really matters if we're going to add a lot of new users. Is that true? Are we going to add a lot of new users? And it would matter if we were going to add a lot of new users and we somehow knew that our product is actually very good, the product has product market fit, but somehow these new users are not understanding how to get value out of the product. That is where onboarding would really matter. Right? And again, reasonable people will likely. I'm seeing many of you nod like, yes, this is what we can agree on. And finally, what about a gen AI feature? Well, if this new technology makes it 2x3x5x better for us to deliver on value prop, that would be awesome. We should do that. Or if we don't do it and we're worried that all of our customers are going to go to competitor because they're doing it and we should probably prevent that as well. So in this case, again, reasonable people will agree with. And this brings us very well to the next point, which is once you have these scenarios, it's time to turn the problem into a data question. So now that we've established in these extremes, yes, we can all agree we should do that, the question becomes, well, are we in this scenario? And the specific questions that I find so powerful are just simply asking, well, how can we know it's really true that the degraded performance is going to Cause a lot of our customers to churn? Or what evidence do we have that this new Jenna idea is going to be really well received in the market? Or how can we quickly get signal on whether it is the case that most of our engineers are so fed up with the terrible quality of our code base that they're about to rage quit. And once you start asking these questions, I'm sure your brain is already firing all of these different solutions. Let's go do a survey. Let's go talk to our customers. Oh, let's go and check that dashboard. Let's talk to the data scientist and do an ad hoc analysis. But once we all start asking these questions like what evidence do we have? We can quickly figure out how to get the answer. And when I mean data, I mean it very broadly, right? Data is just any information that gives us a little bit more context as to the questions that we have. So could be quantitative, could be talking to customer success or interviewing sales, or just getting on a call with 10 customers, or doing this internal survey. But all of that is going to help us with some of those scenarios that we were looking at before. So back to our examples, we said, look, info rewrite. If the performance is degrading and our customers are going to churn, well, how was our performance? Has it been getting worse? Have we seen that correlate with churn in the customer base? Or have we polled 20 customers and said, hey, how do you feel about the performance? Or how have you felt about the bugginess of our experience as of late? Lots and lots of ideas for how we could get a little bit more evidence. Again, we should also, by the way, if you're a startup, maybe the fact that you don't have that many existing users means it doesn't matter that much if they churn, because you're putting a lot more eggs into acquiring the next set of users. But all of these, understanding where you churn, understanding how many users you have, how many users do you expect to add, how unhappy are engineers, is all give us evidence or data that helps us become more clear about whether we are in scenario one or two or three. Similarly, with onboarding, good questions to ask are like, well, are we really adding a lot of new users in the next quarter, in the next six months? And what is the current retention? And maybe what's good retention look like for our app in the marketplace? Something we can ask our venture capitalists, what is the usage of these core features? And is it true that if we manually walk users through the product and they get it, then they use it a ton versus when they don't. Through the actual product experience, they don't. That makes a real case that onboarding is a great lever. And finally, with adding differentiated AI, have we done any quick experiments? Have we prototyped things? Have we used ChatGPT to answer a bunch of these questions and see if it actually dramatically helps us with the value prop of what we're trying to do? Have we gone and talked to some of our customers? Hey, we got five ideas. Do any of these seem like they would help you do your work or achieve your goals more efficiently? And also, of course, there's customer or there's market research, just looking around, asking around, figuring out what else are our competitors doing and are we going to get left behind. So lots of really great ways to get more insight, get more data. But I can see some of you thinking, okay, I gotta move really quickly. Who has time for all that? And I agree with you because I work in data and I can tell you that data will never actually give you certainty. As much as we'd like to, as much as uncertainty is uncomfortable, we won't ever get the certainty. The best that we can get is, is just a little more evidence, a little more insight. At the end of the day, most of the decisions, including the biggest and most important decisions, we're going to have to make on a leap of faith. Somebody has to make that decision. And so if you've gotten all the data you can get, or maybe you can't get that much and you just have to move on, the question you should ask yourself is, okay, maybe you and I still disagree, right? We got all the data, we looked at the evidence, we're, we're on the same page, we draw on the circle, but we still don't disagree. What should we do? And this is where it's time to move the conversation up a level and make it a people question. Who is now the best person to make the call? Usually I find it is far easier for people to agree on who's the best person to make the call than it is on what the specific decision might be. Now, again, if you're in a large org, there already may be naturally a chain of escalation and you can follow that, but you don't always have to follow it. You can also say, look, you and I, since we're now in the same circle, we know that this person is really deeply invested in the end goal. And for this particular decision, they have the best combination of context and skill. Both are important. If you're going to make a decision on what's the right new technical infrastructure, do not ask me. I don't have the experience to make that. I could have all the context but I'll still probably make a bad decision. Whereas even if somebody has the skill, but they just don't, they don't know, they don't have the data, they don't have the history, the context, they still may not be the best person to make decisions. So you need both best combination of context and skill. Now, as a product leader, what is so powerful about this is that you can actually point towards and nominate the person to make the call. It doesn't have to be the same person that makes every decision. In fact, that would be suboptimal because no single person is the best at having the right context and skill to make every decision. So in certain cases this is where you can nominate. Hey, this decision is a lot more about how we can improve the technical infrastructure. So for the product, I nominate the ENG leader or this particular initiative is much more about how we can improve the customer experience and I'm going to nominate that. In this case we should just listen to the design leader on this. You do not have to be the person who makes all the decisions or knows what the answer is. You have to just make sure the best decisions get made. And one of your biggest lovers is getting better at identifying who who is the best at making which decision. Finally, of course, you want that person to be clear eyed and calm. They don't have a bone to pick. They're not out for revenge, they're not so stressed out about whatever it is going on. That is the person who is ideally the candidate for making the call. So here are some lines you can use. I know that founder mode is all the rage now. Just pull it out there. Guys, we need to founder mode this. So I recommend I make the call. It's also okay to nominate yourself, but make it so that everyone feels like they can share in the fact that we're all doing this again to drive the best outcomes for our team. So let's say you do all this, okay? You do all this, you got the data, you nominate a person and you still feel like we made the wrong call. What do you do? Are we done? By the way, everything I've said so far, it does not guarantee that you're going to get what you want all the time. But the game is not over because I'm a big believer that time eventually reveals more and more truth so what can happen is we did everything. But you're sure, you're certain that this was the wrong call? Write that down. Write down document. If you have a documentation culture, it will be written down. But document, hey, three people didn't think we should do this, and four people did. And we nominated X person to make decision or our vp and we made decision X. But remember who made what calls. And that way, after one month or three months or six months or a year, go back and look at what happened. Did the decision bear fruit? If yes, there's a lot to learn from that. Did the decision not bear fruit also a ton to learn from that. But I think this is so important for, for us to have a practice of. In fact, what I like to do is put a calendar invite for myself at these time frames. So after we make a major call one month later, I'll say, go back and think about that decision we made three months later, six months, right? You will learn different things at different time frames because the story is evolving as we live life. And so when you go back and you watch your replays and you go back and evaluate what was the outcome of these decisions, there's many, many layers of what it is that you learn. Now, the most obvious, the ones that we end up talking the most about as product people are, well, what did we learn about our customers and their needs? And secondly, what did we learn about our product and the levers? You know, is pricing a lever, is onboarding a lever, is putting more power user features a lever for monetization or whatever it is that we're trying to drive. But I want us to go further as well, because beyond those layers, there's also the layer of, hey, are we actually measuring things in the right way? Are we sure that we know what success looks like? Because metric goals can change. And it's my experience, having worked and looked at the history of many things, that sometimes you think that what you have is a growth problem, and it turns out over time it's a retention problem. What you learn is that retention matters more. And once you realize retention matters more over time, you might refine that further. Retention of this particular customer segment matters more because they are the ones that actually lead the most to our ability to monetize and have great monetization retention. So what we learn about the way that we measure success is a third layer, right? Beyond that, we can also learn how do we make decisions. I love the previous talk because it was about that the learning is not necessarily about what is the decision. But how do we come together and do better product reviews? How do we improve the decision making process? Should we spend more time getting evidence or are we repeating the same conversations over and over and we actually need to move a little faster? So there's a meta layer about how we make decisions. And then finally, and I think this is the most underrated, what did we learn about the quality of each person's individual judgment? Because at the end of the day, thinking about influence is thinking about the people problem and the people dynamics. So if your executive is making 10 decisions in a row about some dimension, it turns out over time, he's wrong. I hope the conclusion that the entire company could come to is this person is not to be trusted on whatever it is that they're making. And you're not going to know this until you keep the score and you continually go back and reflect. And this is very important for the self as well. We like to go in. We're product people. We pride ourselves on having great judgment about what it is with product. And there are going to be areas where you have biases, I have biases, I guarantee it. And we're not going to learn about that until we do this over and over again. So to recap, we're going to start by drawing our circle. We're going to assume that we're all seeing parts of the truth, like the blind man and the elephant. We're going to try and be like detectives and together figure out where the truth applies in these extreme examples. Then we're going to see what evidence do we have, Turn it into a data question. And if we don't have time to gather our data, eventually turn it into a people question. And finally, we're going to continue to watch our replays. I want to end on a Zen Buddhist concept. So this is a character called mu, and literally it means nothingness. But in the Buddhist tradition, it's meant to refer to this idea that sometimes the true answer, the best answer, is much greater and vaster than the question that was originally posed. It is often the case that the question we're asking is too narrow of a question. In this case, we started out with prioritizing the info rewrite or the onboarding, or adding a differentiated AI feature. But if you look into the future, three months, six months, a year later, there are actually many, many possibilities for what a great outcome could look like. Perhaps we realize we need better instrumentation and measurement. Perhaps we realize we should do all these. It's more a matter of sequencing than if we should do these things. Perhaps we discover that actually, wow. Once we dug into retention, we realize we have a retention problem. And there's in fact, 20 other ideas we have for how to improve retention. Maybe we came up with a better process for how we work together. A story that I think about a lot is that back in Facebook's history, things were going well. They're growing, growing, growing viral social network, until one day, growth stopped. And what Mark did was task a small group of people to go and solve the growth problem, get us back on track so that we can grow again. And the team came up with a lot of ideas, hypotheses tested and so forth. I don't remember what was the idea or the lever or the thing that they did that started growth again, but I can tell you the process that they uncovered, the culture of growth, the way that they became more data informed, the framework that they develop that turned out to blossom into an incredible cultural set of practices that every single team at Facebook adopted and is still a core part of what makes Facebook Facebook today. That is the true gift. That is the thing, the gift that keeps on giving. So, in conclusion, problems are going to come and go. There's going to be a decision to make today, tomorrow, next year, there's going to be tens of thousands of decisions that you're going to make and that your team are together going to make. But relationships, but the learnings, the people, the wisdom, these things are forever. These things are rare. Figuring out how to do that well and enjoy the process with the people that you work with, that is the truest gift I can think of. Nothing better than waking up every morning and just excited to come into work and solve problems with people we like instead of feeling like it's a fight every day. I think that is what we should be trying to optimize for. Thank you, everyone.