Failure

25:28They were looking for both technology leadership and product leadership and why I know if I was interested in one or both. And I took the meeting even though I wasn't like taking these kinds of calls from anybody, I just seemed like who's going to pass up the opportunity to have one trip with the two of them. So I listened to the pitch and and politely declined and told them that I was going to be like a pastry chef or something. And we kept doing that every couple of months for like seven months. We go to lunch. They give me an update on the progress they're making and I would decline, you know, the invitation to get an awesome out.

26:05And then late in that year, I went to lunch for a more time and Meg explained that they brought on someone to lead technology and they brought another person to lead product and both of them for really truly for reasons that are completely disconnected from from Quibi itself. Both of them had left after about six weeks. And Meg's like, we've raised all this money and we've told the world that we're shipping this product in about a year. We got an awful lot to do and I really could use some help and I would like consider it a personal favor if you would become as then just a couple days a week helping.

26:45You know, she's like, I'll continue to look for someone who actually wants the job, but it would really be, it'd be great if you could help me get this off the ground. And my wife is a freelance writer, marketing strategist and loves her life as a freelance contributor and she's like, you should do this. Like why not? It's two days a week. It's just a few months. What's the worst thing that could happen? Like maybe you'll like it. And I'm like, no, the worst, here's the thing that will happen. Like I won't do it two days a week. It will like immediately be three days, then four days, then five days, then six days.

27:19Like I just know myself. And she's like, no, she's like, you know, just on Wednesday night at six o 'clock, close your Quibi laptop and be like, all they're paying before is for Tuesday and Wednesday and then open it back up on Tuesday morning. Like that's all you've got to do. Well, you know, she's right about most things. If she's wrong about this, I fell deeply into it right away. And it was just so fun to get to build a team from scratch and to design and build a product from scratch and to take advantage of all of the sort of modern software architecture stuff that had come into being over the course of the 15 years since we had started Pandora.

28:01And, you know, I'm embarrassed about some of what happened with Quibi for sure. But I'm super grateful for the experience because I just really fell in love with the industry again. And it was reminded of just how rewarding it can be to build something and to try to put it out there even if you stumble pretty mightily along the way. Is there something that you took away from that experience that taught you what to try to avoid, what to try to pull towards? I think I'd sort of misunderstood or misjudged companies sometimes by thinking about them, like really focused on the product execution. You know, kind of if you find an interesting problem that people, you know, people care about and you you solve that problem in a really beautiful, elegant, delightful way that's 10 times better than anything else that they can get in that same space.

29:04They'll tell their friends and like all the rest of the tools would take care of itself. And so that was always my ambition. Find a thing that I get out about building, do a great job building it really delightful way, go really deep on listening to people and their feedback and iterate your way to success and sort of brazen through that membrane that we all strive to get across the, you know, kind of really great word of mouth. But I think the thing I've come to better appreciate is that companies are also kind of like a, they're kind of a math problem that describes how you take, you know, investment and pour them into the equation and out the other side comes returns on some time horizon.

29:46And yes, there are variables in that equation that are influenced by the product that you build and all of the little details and decisions that you make about making that product great. But if the equation is fundamentally broken or a big swing in and of itself, no amount of like iteration and execution can like kind of get you out of the failed outputs of the broken equation. And I think, you know, quibi made a bet that you could build an entirely bespoke content library that was sufficiently scaled to get people to subscribe and retain for a couple billion dollars. And there's a huge amount of money but, you know, we made, we made 70 shows in 18 months, which is like more content than all of the major broadcast networks combined made in a single year.

30:50So this is a pretty major accomplishment. And we made a bet that we would augment those sort of episodic and serialized for Hollywood style shows with a bunch of daily content that we produce at the level of like network television nightly news and so forth that would be an alternative to some of the sort of daily content that you might otherwise get on YouTube. And that was going to be about a third of the content spend. One like super interesting thing that no one talks about is that all of that content was designed to be made like day of or day before it aired. So there was no back catalog of it.

31:31And it was all designed to be shot in these professional studios that we built out. And it was really expensive. Like I said, it was like a third of the of the investment we're going to make in content, maybe half almost half the investment we're going to make in content. And we launched two weeks in the COVID and we couldn't make any of that content except literally in the garages of the host homes. And so we had this thing that was supposed to seem like really set apart from YouTube that literally now was being made exactly like YouTube content, which is sort of like self -produced at home with, you know, very little sort of the support infrastructure of Hollywood.

32:10Now you can argue, I mean, I think the content on YouTube is really, really exceptional in this category. And maybe we were never going to do better than that. But I think it was really fundamentally burgundy was that the actual foundational equation of can you make enough premium content that's totally bespoke and made for the service and taste the advantages of the nature of the phone. It is that enough content to get people to sign up and retain. And you do that for a couple billion dollars. And I think the answer is no, the library has to be much, much bigger. And you have to have like any company, you have to have sufficient time and energy to iterate on the content format itself because we were really, our roadmap really wanted to innovate on the content format.

32:59And so I think part of what happened is pretty quickly it became clear that the math was just wrong. It wasn't going to take two billion. It was going to take six or eight or 10 billion. And the risk reward profile of betting 10 billion on the format was just more than anyone can stand. Next up, we've got Shree Bachu, former head of growth at Ram, who shares something that I've thought about ever since we had this conversation, which is this idea that when you fail, make sure you fail conclusively to make this failure an actual learning that you can build off of versus just a waste of time. Here's Shree.

33:38Growth experiments in my history are typically like 30 % issue success rate. So the vast majority of things that you try don't work. And so you want to create a culture where people aren't afraid to take risk and aren't afraid to fail. And for me, failure is not that you didn't drive revenue. Failure is not learning. Like so it's really important that you learn when you fail. And so we celebrate failure as long as you're learning. And you can only learn if you designed the right test and you failed conclusively. Because otherwise, I think many of us have been in situations where there's intuition that something might work and it doesn't work.

34:17And then you end up doing it over and over for years. Because every time in you exactly where somebody else has the same idea, you try it again. And it's because you haven't been able to design the test to fail conclusively. And it's hard to do, but at the end of day, there's only two ways to make an experiment successful. Either you have a very large N or you have a very significant treatment, which is like what you're doing in the experiment itself. And in B2B, you don't usually have the luxury of large N, which you should do and consumer. Facebook can get that second two hours. A B2B company can take two years to get to the same number of touch points.

35:02And so to counteract that, I recommend people just try to maximize the treatment effect, which is like, if you have a hypothesis that you're testing, just throw all of the possible tactics and resources that you think would move that needle. Because you can always cost rationalize later if it works. And so maximize the treatment effect. And with all of that, it didn't work. Then you can say, hey, we're not going to try this again, because we literally did try everything that we could to test this hypothesis. And if it doesn't work in the best version, and it's expensive as it is, this is not worth spending more time on.

35:40But if it does work great, then you do another version of the test with like half the tactics, or whichever taxes you think work better or worse, and you optimize over time. Is there an example you could share when you did that? And you can't face marketing. Something that is very common in enterprise software, where you select it, certain customers that you think are high priority. And you're saying, I want to touch them in as many nuanced ways possible to see if that drives conversion. And this is something I've seen tried many times where people do it, but they do it halfway, where they're like, okay, try these three things.

36:24Conversion of the control group wasn't higher. And so we think it does not go work. And then a new go -to -market executive comes, and they have to do it again. They have to do it again. It's a very common one where this happens. And so when we did it at Graham, we did exactly what I just described, which is like, let's really be thoughtful about the experiment design, both in terms of maximizing the number of people as well as maximizing the number of ways and types of ways that were effectively touching these target customers to show the value. So what it sounds like is the hypothesis isn't like this email will have a big impact on conversion.

37:10It's like this strategy of coming after customers is what we're testing. That's the example there, right? And I think like, if you, for example, if you have the, it's this kind of framework is more important for cross -functional larger scale bigger tests rather than like an email modification, right? But we can even use it on a micro example, like an email modification, right? Where you are like, okay, I think this particular email is underperforming because it's not talking to this part of the customer's pay point or journey. And you could just, the simplest test would be, okay, let me make some tweaks and to the text and edit that.

37:54And that could be the end of that test. And if that doesn't work, you're like, oh, maybe those were the right text of it. Let me do a different test of it. Or whatever. And that's fine. That's low cost. It's not the end of the world. And it's for you to be wrong there. But an alternative that you could do is like, oh, what are all of the things that I could change about this email in the same test? Is it the trigger of the email? Is it the text content of the email? Is it additional persuasation? Is it the design of the email? Like trying to think about what are all of the various levers that you think could be wrong and put them all together to test your hypothesis of this touch point is wrong.

38:32And how do I improve that? Well, obviously the downside of that is you don't, if it doesn't work, you don't know if it's like, oh, maybe it was this thing could have worked Yeah. So there's always trade offs on this. And so, but when you're hoping is like, you've done a complete refresh where you did all the things that you thought were intuitive. That should work. And if it doesn't work, then you're like, okay, maybe my hypothesis is wrong. But you're right. You're always going to be a challenge. Maybe the execution is wrong. And I did too many things eventually. In that case. Our next story is from Jay Z, who is a colleague of mine, itterbimb, had a product at Wepplow when we recorded this episode.

39:08And this is her sharing the story of one of the biggest product misses at Airbnb. You've seen a lot of new pms. And you've seen these pms succeed. You've seen some fail. What are the most common mistakes that you find new pms make in this experience of kind of helping new pms get into the field? I think the thing that is really hard to untrain, but I think every human does it is you jump to solutions. And so one of the biggest things I see not just in my course, but also just as a pm and like some of the mistakes that you make as a pm is the idea of get really attached to a solution, a way of implementing something, something that you can see in your head that you want to build.

39:46And so that's the first thing I really want to like, untie in our course. And so a lot of people will literally come in. They'll be like, I want to build X startup or I want to do this thing or I'm in blank school and I've been doing a lot of research on this particular area. And so like untraining that and be like, Hey, we're going to go out there. We are not going to think at all about the thing that you want to build. And instead, we're going to be focused on users and people in the real world and their problems. And the first step is to understand their problems and then to understand if there's an opportunity here as opposed to, Hey, you want to build X thing for Y person.

40:19So that's the biggest mistake that you really have to untie and like, re -train thinking around. So let's kind of go to the other side of this question. We talked about what mistakes new punes make. I'm curious what's the biggest product mistake that you've made? Wow, that's a good one. It's so interesting. I feel like as product people were always making mistakes and we're always learning. Maybe I'll give an example from Airbnb since you and I were booked there. And this one does stand out to me. So, you know, we're working on this concept called Airbnb plus. You know, if you took a step back, we're really trying to do is to be like, Hey, not everyone trusts Airbnb in terms of, you know, it's a platform.

40:55It's not like it's managed inventory. It's not a hotel. How do you go in and really make sure that we're like all the Airbnb's aren't meeting the quality bar. But I do think we were very solution first. And I think we're also competitor afraid at the time. Right. So it was during a time where there were managed marketplaces. There were the the Saunders out there. And I think that as a company, we're very much like, oh, goodness, like what's what are we going to do in the world of managed marketplaces? And so we went really hard down the solution space. We essentially were like, let's go inspect our inventory.

41:25Let's actually try to manage our inventory more. And really what we should have done is taken us back and be like, what's the real problem? The real problem is people want to know what they're getting themselves into. We need to represent the homes a lot better. And I think the other piece here that's really important is what as a company is your strategic strength? And like what's in your real house? So for example, Airbnb, we weren't that strong in operations. We again, we're this platform with this marketplace. Right. And so if you don't have that muscle and then you're asking the company, the teams to essentially build it from the ground up, that's really really difficult.

41:57Not to mention the unit economics is or the unit economics actually going to work even as you scale. Yeah, I feel like Airbnb plus is an untold story that somebody should tell and that could be its own podcast, I guess. You and I can tell it. We could tell this could be Airbnb plus the hidden the story. As you said, the problem is trying to solve was people don't really trust. They don't want to even consider Airbnb because it's like, no, I don't want to stay in someone's home. I don't know what it'll be. It's unpredictable. And so as an outsider felt like a really clever approach, we're going to vet them.

42:28We're going to make sure they're awesome. There's a minimum bar. I think the, and I guess this is the question is, do you think it was just like this is never possible because they will will never make money as a business doing this because we don't make that much per booking and investing time resources, sending people pillows, all that stuff is ever going to be economical. Or do you think there was a path that was just not executed well? I think there wasn't really a clear path. I think there's what's my impression. Exactly. And it was more just like if you understood, again, this is what my point around unit economics, there are things where I think you have like magical thinking around unit economics, you're like, well, when we get to the scale of X, it's all going to work out.

43:07We can make these things happen. I think you actually need to really make sure the unit economics work right at the beginning. So that is definitely one lesson. And I think the other thing is going back to spirit of what are you trying to achieve? If you're trying to achieve this idea of like really knowing the quality of the place and and for a platform like Airbnb, the right way to go about doing is through a reviews, right? Through our guest reviews, which are essentially free as opposed to literally sending out inspectors. And I think that the other things are, if you can get signal on, what are the things wrong quality that people care about?

43:38Is it cleaner? The cleaning? Is it the, hey, I'm locked out? And I think that there are other solutions besides inspection that then get at that. So for example, it is actually cheaper to go send everyone a lock box than to deploy an inspector and go look at your property, right? It is actually cheaper to maybe do a partnership with like a, you know, a bunch of cleaners in different local areas and then get that as part of the feet, like as opposed to doing inspection. So again, it's really about what are you really trying to achieve? What is the user problem with each of these areas? And can you target that problem with the particular listing that is, you know, that you're looking at?

44:14And so I, yeah, I personally don't believe the unit economics ever would have really worked out. I think we should have known that, or we should have dug into that more at the very beginning and then to get very tailored, instead of like one blunt instrument to solve it all, hey, we're going to go inspect. It's like, what is the problem for this listing and what's the best solution to fix that problem? Our second to last story is from Gina Godhulf, who is an early growth leader at Duelingo. She's her sharing a wide ranging and important point about how everyone has both an A side and a B side to their career and people often only share their A side.

44:50So this is Gina sharing her B side. We are very encouraged in our lives, especially professionally, to talk about our A sides all the time because that's what impresses people. That's what open stores. That's what allows us to keep growing and it's so important. So it means that a lot of what you hear in podcasts and on, on stage ends up being the Instagram of both version of someone or a company or a country's trajectory. It's just the highlights. When I talk about my A side, it's very impressive. I did things like we'll talk about. I met President Obama. I worked on the Bloomberg presidential campaign.

45:26I helped Duelingo scale from three to two hundred million users. I worked with Tumblr, helping them scale Latin America and recent heroin's invested in my company, et cetera. But between all of those highlights, there were so many B moments that get sort of like shoved under the rug because it's just easier for me and it's more impressive for others. But I really like to highlight those because I think that most of us have a lot of B moments every day, every week, every month, and every period of our lives. And it's easy to think that things aren't just not going to work out for us because we're in one of those B moments.

45:56If we don't recognize them as moments. I love this concept. We're going to talk as you expected about a lot of your A side stuff. Is there any example of a B side story of your life that would be interesting to share? Look, I think those are the most interesting because they're funny or ridiculous. I had a lot of B sides and I still do. For example, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I actually wanted to be an actress. I either wanted to be that person in SeaWorld who goes like this with Adolphin. This is before SeaWorld was canceled. Or I wanted to be an actress. I applied to schools. I didn't get into any Ivy League.

46:33I didn't get into any of the top schools I wanted to go to. When I got to college, I actually ended up dropping out because I got so depressed. Incredibly depressed. I couldn't get out of bed depressed. Ironically, I dropped out of Reed College, which is the same college that Steve Jobs dropped out of. So I was just destined for greatness. I knew it at that moment. It all makes sense looking backwards, as he said. Totally. I was dropping out being like, yes, this is exactly the path. No, I was miserable. I thought there was no path forward. I finally went back and graduated. The college counselor looked at my curriculum and said, what have you even done with your life?

47:08There's nothing to show for. It was shocking because I was always like the overachiever who wanted to do the maximum curriculum and I ace all of my classes and do whatever. I did three diplomas in high school, the International American, the Brazilian. That for me, I think my one learning there that has stuck with me and I think it can work for other people too, is that it's not just about doing things that actually matter and learning. It's about being able to tell the story and it's about understanding what other people perceive as valuable. I applied to 100 companies. I didn't hear back from most of them.

47:45I finally got an internship at a tier B slash C digital marketing agency in New York City because I wanted to live in New York so badly. They forgot to apply for my visa on time. I lost my visa and had to go back to Brazil. Then I ended up leaving that organization to go work for another one. I won't even go into the details of the shadiness of that company that I worked for it. But then they ended up laying me off. I lost my visa again, had to go back home. Found another opportunity that got fired that time. There was just a lot of rockiness in my start that I don't think he would imagine when you see someone up on stage, leading a conference for 5 ,000 people that I think is important.

48:26Even when I started working for Tumblr, I was like, this is it. I made it. This is a really interesting company. This is going to work out. That was super rocky because it was an early stage startup. They couldn't figure out how to wire money to Brazil. I was not paid for six months and at one point in me and my colleagues were trying to get money out of the teller to pay contractors because we had no money to pay them. We borrowed money from people and finally they also laid me off because they decided to sell Ciyahu. Then I had to figure out what am I going to do. No one's going to hire me. I've been fired and laid off so many times.

49:00So this is all before I started an agency to help US -based tech companies and startups grow in Latin America because I figured I was in this really great place to make that happen. It eventually worked for well -known companies such as Duolingo. At the time they weren't well -known. They were a tiny little startup. They didn't have an Android app. That's how I started working with Duolingo because their head of marketing connected with someone they had worked with at Flickr and said, I noticed Tumblr grew a lot in Brazil last year. Can you recommend a company or an agency to help? They said this girl.

49:31That was 26. That's how they connected me with Duolingo. I started helping them grow in Brazil as a consultant. They were like, this is great. You help us grow in Chile, Argentina. I was like, yes, they were like, how about Mexico? I was like, yes. Did I know anything about these places, Lenny? Did I know people there? No. But you can figure it out. Then they ended up asking me to come on full time. Do that across the world, Japan, China, Korea, Turkey, Spain, France, etc. Then to own growth, which ended up meeting communications, social media, government partnerships, anything to grow. Then eventually became an eB testing growth engine with engineers, NPMs and designers, which I knew nothing about.

50:15Even after that, I left Duolingo five years later. Didn't know what to do with my life. You think, wow, you have it figured out. Now you left Duolingo. You have the world in front of you. Maybe I can finally go work for nonprofits, which is what I actually wanted to do in the first place. Try to hand it at that. I had a couple of experiences before going to work for the Mike Bloomberg campaign. Working for the Mike Bloomberg campaign is impressive. But you know what? Mike Bloomberg didn't win. He's not the president. So that was not a successful campaign. If you really look at it and yeah, a latitude seems like it's a really promising path.

50:50But there's eight days and B days. So it's just a lot of that and just staying resilient and believing in yourself and getting back on the horse when you fall in your face. Amazing. It's such an important message. I think one of the threads from what you're describing something that I think about a lot is people kind of underestimate how long their career is. There's just so much time to do stuff and for things to start to work. This thing doesn't sound really fancy, but I think Marcus Aurelius has this quote about how our life is actually very long. We just use it really badly. We just waste a lot of our time.

51:21I think you're so right, Lenny. And I love that because people are going around being like, life is short, life is short. But that's so true. We waste so much time. But also I think we don't recognize how much opportunity we have in front of us. And as a 26 year old, I definitely thought my career was over. I was like, I blew it. And like looking back, it's funny. You know? Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. Like I spent nine years at my first job at a random company in San Diego and a startup. And it's like, what am I doing here so long? And then it turned out that I was really useful for the thing I did next.

51:52And then eventually, I want to think started to really take off. So I think that's a really good lesson for people. It's just a long time. Like this is my fourth career. Like I switched careers many times. I was an engineer, then I was a founder, then I was a product manager. And whatever this is, whatever you call this thing. I guess me too. I was an operator. I was a consultant. Well, I was an employee. I was a consultant. Then I was an operator, which is a fancy way to say employee at a startup. And then now I'm a founder and a VC and an angel. And whatever this is. Awesome. Awesome. So I think I think that's a really important takeaway.

52:25It's just there's a lot of time to do stuff and don't stress if things aren't moving as fast as you want. I'm curious. What's like a mess up or a big mistake? Maybe that you made or your teammate that was like, oh, wow, that was a big waste of time. Yeah. Look, a lot of things didn't work out. More than 50 % of our AB tests didn't work out. We made bets that didn't make sense. I will say though that like in the spirit of A and B sides, I, and I think in general, we are really good at forgetting the B stuff. Like I, I talk so much about all the stuff that worked that it's hard to remember like all of those moments that didn't actually work.

53:00And the moment and the thing that I tend to talk about, which is like this mistake that we made as the growth team is almost like one of those like when you get asked in an interview, like what's your, what's like your biggest weakness and you're like, I'm a perfectionist, you know, it's like one of those things that actually makes you sound good because it's the story about how my team really wanted to implement badges. We spend a lot of time playing all the games that were popular at the time, trying to understand how those gamification growth hacks that we could find in those apps would potentially overlay onto dualingo and how, you know, we would do that.

53:35And badges was just pervasive in all of the top games. And so it seemed like a no brainer. But since we ranked all of our experiments in terms of ROI and return being like, how many users we think we're going to get from this, the use and in fact time investments, it was never, it never made sense to focus on this because we thought that the time sync would be too high. So I actually ended up not letting the team run this experiment for like six months so that we focus on lower hanging fruit. So that's a mistake on my end. Then we decided to, we decided to run this experiment in the most lean way possible.

54:09We're like, you know what, like there's MVP, there's like minimum viable experiments. We don't have to run a whole badges thing. We can just like do something more simple and actually see if that like leads to growth in an interesting way and then we'll know. And we ran this very simple experiment that was like, you sign up and then you get a badge and it was like, this girl with a balloon, I don't know, she was like happy or whatever. And of course, of course, in retrospect, it led to no results because no one is proud of signing up. It's not an exciting moment. And you don't even have badges to collect.

54:35You can't show it to other people like none of the things that make badges compelling were there. But we were like, okay, well, we decided it didn't work and then we moved on. So we moved on for like another, I don't know, eight months. And we didn't look back. And then when we did look back, first of all, at that point, we discovered that we hadn't been dog fooding, okay, which also was embarrassing looking back. We hadn't been dog fooding in the growth scene. We just come up with hypotheses. We were super careful about prioritizing them and making sure that we were doing the best possible like write -ups and all these things.

55:04But like, the dog fooding piece, it just, I didn't come from a product background. I was a marketer. And I hadn't even, I didn't really understand the term dog fooding. But when we thought of, we had a conversation, we were like, you know what, if we had just tested that, we would have all known that this was a super lame badge. And I was like, why are we not testing our experiments? And so like that became part of our of our practice. It's still relevant. I just had a conversation yesterday with engineers at latitude. I haven't explained what we built yet, where we're building it. Maybe we'll get there.

55:34But I was talking yesterday to engineers at latitude. And they're awesome. Like, in terms of product team, we have like the number eight employee at New Bank. He might have heard of New Bank, but it's this like massive banking, like FinTech in Latin America. And we have people from like other FinTechs. And then we have this guy who was a lead PM at Twilio. And I was explaining to them why we should be dog fooding. And they were all like, oh yeah, we should dog food. It's just like easy to forget stuff like that. So, so that was a mistake that, you know, we could have probably gotten to the growth that we got to with badges much earlier on.

56:04And not only did we get to growth with badges, but it became like this amazing treasure trove of opportunity because once you have badges and people want them, you can now ask people to do anything. Like go find friends, go buy things, like, you know, whatever it is. And so like we had we impacted almost all metrics across the company positively. But including some we hadn't expected. But it's like easy to talk about a mistake that ended up being a win. So that's why I compared it to the interview thing in the beginning. But you know, we we tried making a dual lingua social app really early on and failed.

56:38It was called duals, dual duels, like you could do all, you know, I know we were we were clever, but people didn't use it. We didn't figure out why we we tried making a dual lingua for schools platforming. We couldn't get it to pick up. I went and launched dual lingua in China and got downloaded by a million people in the first day and then the app got blocked. And I we you know, because of the government. And then we couldn't figure out what to do. And then everyone rated the app like one star because it didn't work. And so then we had a really like a lot of trouble actually recovering from that.

57:11We launched dual lingua in India and didn't realize because we couldn't have unless we went there, which we finally did that most people set their phones phone UI in India to English because typing in India is hard. And of course, there's a lot of languages throughout India. And we were making it so that when you downloaded dual lingua whatever UI you open your app your your phone was set to we offered not that language for you to learn that was your base language. So we were telling people learn French, Spanish, German from English. And they were all trying to learn English. So they didn't find what they were looking for.

57:44They left. There were so many mistakes, you know, and luckily I think we were able to to bounce back from most of them in terms of how dual lingua is doing today. And our final story is from Maggie Crowley, VP of Product at Toast. And one of the most beloved episodes of the podcast. This is Maggie sharing something a little bit different. Her favorite interview question about failure and what it tells you about the person you're interviewing plus a story of her own product failure. Here's Maggie. A question I ask in every product interview is what's the worst product you ever shipped? And that's because I don't think you're a good PM if you haven't shipped something that's really shitty.

58:23Like you just haven't had enough reps, you haven't done it enough time. Like and it's not only that you've done it, but that you can admit it and you know which one it is. Like that's so important. And I remember one was so dumb. I can't I'm still so mad about this that we did this. It was I won't name which team which company I'm not going to call that out, but we wanted we decided we needed to do a rewrite. Red flag number one of a existing product. And you know engineer who I'd work with many times, we had a really good relationship. And this person was like, yeah, it's going to take six months.

58:57No problem. Core part of the product I've been around forever. Like one of those things that the code is still is still the code written by the founders kind of thing. It didn't take six months. It took two and a half years. It still wasn't done. It almost never like it went on for so much longer than it should have. It took us forever to get to future parity. It was the worst project. Like so many people rotated in and out of it. Everyone thought it was dumb. Like sunk cost fallacy. Just the worst. And it's because A, we got arrogant and we thought we could do it. B, we skipped discovery. We didn't really write a one pageer.

59:36We just went for it. We didn't do enough technical and design research into what the requirements would actually have to be. And there you have it. And then now we're out. Where was it a huge success in the end? Change the trajectory of the business. Absolutely not. But you know what? I didn't get fired. So like it's fine. I feel like I've gone through those experiences and then like three, four years later. It's like another maybe this rewrite and redesign may work. Because just we have an updated this thing in a long time. Just don't do it. Don't rewrite. If anyone ever tells you to do a rewrite, don't do it.

1:00:08Aside by side rewrite. Nope. Yeah. I've never had a like what I ran into is once you get too far down a redesign slash rewrite, everything's building in that new world and then you launch an experience negative. And then it's just like, oh, we just got a launch. We're going to call back or get a figure out how to get back to neutral someday. Yeah. Yeah. Don't do good times. And that is a wrap. I hope you enjoyed these stories of failure. I want to give a huge special thank you to all of our amazing guests for being vulnerable and sharing these stories of failure in their career. I hope you leave this episode with a new perspective on how setbacks and challenges and failure can often be exactly what you need to get to the next step of your career or your life.

1:00:51If you've got a great story to tell about failure, I'd love to hear it. Leave a comment either on YouTube or on Lenny's newsletter .com or just DM me on Twitter or you could reach out at LennyRigitsky .com and click the big contact button. Thank you for listening. Bye everyone.