Lessons on product sense, AI, the first mile experience, and the messy middle | Scott Belsky (Adobe)

Yeah. You know, I've had this conversation quite a few times over the years with founders and friends who were running a company going sideways or, or, or worse, and have had this question, should I continue or not? I always have the same answer. I basically say, "How much conviction do you have in the solution you're building? I know in the beginning, before you knew all you know now, you had tons of conviction. That's what caused you to leave your job. Now, knowing all you know, do you have more or less conviction in the problem and, and the solution you're building?" And I'll tell you, like, I get different answers. You know, some people are like, "Oh, Scott, I mean, I have more conviction. Like, all that I've learned, all the validation I've received from customers, we just haven't figured it out yet. It's driving me crazy. We've tried three times and it's still like, each product fails, but I have more conviction than ever before." And for those people I'm like, "You know what? You're just in the messy middle. Stick with it." You know, this is, this is, uh, par for the course. But, you know, oftentimes I'll hear a, "Honestly, if I knew now what I... If I knew then what I know now, I would not have done this." Like, "Holy shit." I'm like, "Then quit! Like, your life is short. You have a great team. Pivot, do something completely different." If you've lost conviction, you should not be doing what you're doing in the world of entrepreneurship.

(Instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Scott Belsky. Scott is an absolute product legend. He's a former founder starting a company called Behance that he sold to Adobe, where he worked up the ranks to chief product officer, and more recently to chief strategy Officer and Executive Vice President of Design and Emerging Products. He's also an author of the beloved book, The Messy Middle. He's also an angel investor in companies like Pinterest, Uber, Airtable, Flexport, Warby Parker, and many more. In our wide ranging conversation, Scott shares his advice on how to build product sense, why you should only build half the features that you want, what it takes to build a successful consumer product, and we spend a lot of time on how AI is likely to change the world of product and the world broadly. Scott is such an insightful and articulate thinker, and I learned a lot from this conversation. With that, I bring you Scott Belsky after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Braintrust, where the world's most innovative companies go to find talent fast so that they can innovate faster. Let's be honest, it's a lot of work to build a company. And, if you want to stay ahead of the game, you need to be able to hire the right talent quickly and confidently. Braintrust is the first decentralized talent network where you can find, hire and manage high quality contractors in engineering, design and product for a fraction of the cost of agencies. Braintrust charges a flat rate of only 10%, unlike agency fees of up to 70%, so you can make your budget go four times further. Plus, they're the only network that takes 0% of what the talent makes, so they're able to attract and retain the world's best tech talent. Take it from DoorDash, Airbnb, Plaid, and hundreds of other high growth startups that have shaved their hiring process for months to weeks at less than a quarter of the cost by hiring through Braintrust's network of 20,000 high quality, vetted candidates ready to work. Whether you're looking to fill in gaps, upscale your staff, or build a team for that dream project that finally got funded, contact Braintrust and you'll get matched with three candidates in just 48 hours. Visit usebraintrust.com/lenny or find them in my show notes for today's episode. That's usebraintrust.com/lenny for when you need talent yesterday. 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 DraftKings, Zapier, ClickUp, Twitch and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern grow team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform where I was able to slice and dice data by device types, country, user stage. Eppo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytic cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your North Star metrics, like activation, retention, subscription and payments. Eppo supports tests on the front end, on the back end, email marketing, even machine learning plans. Check out Eppo at GetE-P-P-O.com. That's GetEppo.com and 10X your experiment velocity. Scott, welcome to the podcast.