YouSaid · the spoken record

Eeke de Milliano

lines on the record: 69
first: 2023-02-02
most recent: 2023-02-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Definitely find me online on Twitter. It's AkadiM. And how can they help us? Try the ritual product and give us some feedback. Yes”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It basically records everything that you're doing on your computer and then makes it really easy for you to search it, which is, it's just incredible. I don't know if you work this way, Lenny, but I feel like nowadays I don't really go to tabs anymore. I kind of directly search for the thing that I'm searching for. And I think rewind just like fits that user behavior so, so well.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because I think humble people will always say luck in some way. And I always kind of wanted to know, like, did you have self-aware are you, basically? And I think, and how curious are you? And I think people really sort of gone back and reflected on. Why are they where they are today really says a lot about how they think about the world?”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this one's great. I can't choose between these two. One is Lex Friedman, and then the other is Econ Talk by Russ Roberts. I really like that both of them are, like their agenda is like curiosity, which I love.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bird by bird, instructions on writing and life by Anne Lamotte. It's incredible, so touching, really great. Also, I think product managers should be great writers. So love that. And then the other book that I was going to say, but I'm glad you mentioned Claire, is Claire's book, Scaling People, which is coming out. I had a very small hand in ghostwriting for her a little bit in the first draft. So I use a lot of the early chapters from that book still in management. And I still recommend sort of the tactics in there. So I'm excited for her to get it out.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I do a little personal exercise for myself every six months where I sit, like sort of chart out the team that we have today and like write down all the strengths that we have, all the weaknesses that we have as a team. And then I try to sort of hire specifically for those weaknesses.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's one example. I think there's others as well. Like some PMs are just incredible execution machines. Other PMs are like amazing visionaries. You kind of want a little bit of all of them. And you want to also balance within all of your different pillars. So we have three different product pillars at Retool and there's kind of needs for all those pillars. And I always push the leads to sort of hire people who don't look like them so that we have balance everywhere.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best product teams in my mind have really figured out how to balance the talent portfolio. So instead of sort of having a bunch of PMs who all spike in one particular area, figure out how you can create complementary skill sets for the whole PM team so that the whole is much stronger. And one way in which I like to do that is I really like to balance product teams with homegrown product managers who really get the product they've probably been in it. They're amazing culture carriers often. They really set the tone, but they may not have seen product management at other companies and they may not have some of the sort of more conventional traditional product management skill sets. So I want to balance that with product managers who've come from other companies and have done it and can bring a little bit more of that product manager rigor, even though they don't have that sort of, you know, the core and the retail case management.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it's back to all of product management is portfolios and funnels. I think it's really tempting as a manager to build a team in your image because you understand their skill sets and you value those skill sets. And you're going to be able to detect and assess those skill sets better.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So than product managers, even, but it also goes the other way. Like if you are going to ship something or if you are going to put out a roadmap, how do you make sure that the sales team has everything that they need, the sales and reach those case, the success team and the support team has everything they need to accurately talk to customers about that? And I've always actually found that really hard because it's really hard to figure out the right altitude if you're giving a presentation on the roadmap people are either going to feel like it's too high level or it's too low level for folks who maybe are new. So this year we're actually trying something different. We are doing a science fair where each product team has a little booth and they get to sort of stand there and anyone who has questions about the product can come from the go-to-market side can come and ask questions and get demos and go like as deep as they need to. So I'll let you know how that goes, but I'm excited to.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of insights on that. One actually, I think, interesting insight is that teams that have one always want the other. Whenever I talk to candidates, I feel like you can always tell what their company has because they'll be asking a lot of questions about the opposite. Like they're probably like grow company and they'll be like, well, how are you guys thinking about enterprise? And then if they are like more of a sales-led growth company, they're like, well, how are you guys thinking about your self-serve motion or your product-led growth? My main takeaway just, and I don't know if I would even sort of use the dichotomy of product like growth or sales and growth with retool. I think we do have a lot of product-led growth, but we work with a lot of enterprise customers and a lot of revenue comes from enterprise customers. And we have like a fantastic sales team. And I think the main thing is that you just have to really figure out your interaction mechanisms with sales. And that just has to be so, so tight. And he goes in both directions. There's obviously like, how do you get feedback from them? Because they are so often on the front lines talking to customers.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, we build many, basically all of our internal tooling happens in Retooling. All their team dashboards are in Retool, all of their, yes, their task tracking is in Retool, submitting linear requests or bug requests happens in Retool and then goes to linear. So it's just, yeah, it's how we run the company.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use Slack very heavily to talk to our customers and interact with them. So we at this point, I think, have hundreds of Slack channels with customers every time we're testing a new product or we're kind of a new customer who's somewhat large comes online, we will work with them in Slack to get their off-the-cut feedback just back and forth. It's really nice. We just have this direct line to them, which is awesome. And then the fourth thing we do is we use Retool to build Retool. So our product roadmap lives in a retool app. And the app that we use to have feature flags for particular features is a retool app. So PMs are just in the product all day long, every day. They're their own customers in a lot of ways. And that really helps as well.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think every good product team figures out how to sort of get close to customers. But just based off of my observations from Ritual and what I've seen at other companies, there are a couple of things that are more pronounced at Retool than I've seen in a lot of other places. The first is we have a lot of PMs who used to be in customer facing roles at Retool. I obviously am a big fan of that. I think it's there's just nothing like really understanding the value of your product at the moment where a customer actually has to put money down. And so I really like that about PMs who have had those conversations with customers. They really, really get it. Second is because the retail product is so technical, and I do think this just depends on what product you have, like our PMs are really very technical. Everyone has, you know, either a CS degree or has done some sort of engineering in the past. Third is we”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This, I think, is really one of the trickiest parts of product management in my mind. We don't have a company-wide process on this. It's pretty team specific. Some teams do like Friday bug bashes. Other teams are just kind of, you know, as products roll out, we'll kind of work on them as they go. I was actually speaking to a product manager at a different company who mentioned that they just spent the last 18 months doing basically just product polish and bugs. And I think they lend it in a place where they just had to do it because they just had so much debt. But luckily we're not there yet. But right now we let most of the teams just kind of do it themselves and figure out what makes sense for them.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, to me, that falls squarely in the 70%. So, yeah, core product, tech debt, sort of the stuff that you kind of, the maintenance mode type stuff. And core products, obviously you're also doing a bunch of new stuff there too. But yeah, no more than 70% of your resources should be going there.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, and then the last one is this idea of 70, 2010 split investments. I really think that a lot of product management can sometimes be reduced to funnels and portfolios. So the 70, 2010 investments model in my head is just like 70% of your building time should really be going to your core product that has product market fit. 20% of your time should be going to strategic initiatives that aren't core, but like they're strategic to the company. You know you have to do them. And then 10% of your time should be going towards bets.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one. The other head of design, Ryan, I think, always kind of reminds us of is built the scooter, not the axle. So if you're trying to build the minimum viable product for a car, don't sort of build just the wheels and the axle, like build the scooter first, and then from there you build the bicycle and the motorcycle, and then the car. It's always just such a good reminder. Like you always kind of want to start building the whole thing, but like really try and think about the slice that gets the customer to like complete value on a smaller thing first. So with Retool Mobile, for example, there's just so much you could be building there. And we decided very specifically, we're only going to build this for companies that have field workers. And like, you know, they would need to do inventory management. And it's a very specific slice, but it helps us kind of get through from something that was actually viable beginning to end.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. Yeah, I'm sure. If you're like at the end, you're trying to optimize, et cetera. Absolutely. But in that sort of early product development stage, it's like, it's just not worth it to be too focused on that.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And we're kind of going down this path of like, oh, well, you know, if this gets really big, like there's going to be all this abuse of the product. And Anthony, our founder was like, wouldn't that be an amazing problem to have? We're like, yeah, that's a really good point. So we kind of put that on the back burner.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Immediately, I was thinking about this actually just the other day because we were in this product review and we're talking about this other new product that we're thinking of exploring.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a couple of mental models I use. The first is build for your best user, not your worst user. And what I mean by that is I think it's actually really easy to kind of get stuck or to sort of focus on like what if there's abuse of this product or think about all the ways in which the product won't be used well. And then you kind of end up sort of shaping the product in these like really weird, funky ways to make up for that. Whereas like in reality, the worst users are always like, they should be a fraction of your users anyway. So like you shouldn't really, really be building for them. I think a really good example of this is like onboarding processes where you're probably going to be building an onboarding process where you're trying to maybe sort of collect a lot of data or try and like figure out like, hey, how do I help this user who maybe isn't sort of well suited for my product be successful? Like really should just be building an onboarding process for the user who's like going to jump into your product and get”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, the unlock for organizations as managers for this, because you need managers to both detect the high performers and be like, this person doesn't need the process and that you need managers to give that person air cover to be like, we're honestly, because what you're doing is you're giving them some special treatment and you need to be kind of okay with that. And you also need to be okay with the organizational cost for that. Like Claire, who used to be the CO of Stripe, would always say, like, are you willing to break the org for this person? And I always thought that was like a really nice framing. And you kind of need to decide who you want to do it for too. But yeah, some people are just that good that like, yeah, of course we'll break the org for them. They like, you know, they're going to break the org in the best way possible.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the top down. And then the second thing that I've noticed is that your time horizon really shifts as you get more mature. So if you're very early on, you don't have PMF, like you should have a charter, but your charter should be like three months in the future because you can't look that much further. And if you're kind of a company that's humming and going, your charter is probably the horizon's like maybe a decade.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have throughout its life cycle. And then I think how sort of involved it is or how long-term it is really depends on how big you are. But those documents to me are the charter. So what is your mission, your vision, and your strategy? The goals, what are you aiming to do and how are you going to measure success? And then the roadmap. What is the thing that you're shipping? And I think the whole company needs these. The whole function, so like in product, like you need all three of these. And then within each team, you need all three of these. And I kind of like noticed two things about this framework for myself. Like one, I've actually noticed that teams often work their way from the bottom up versus top down. Like they start with a roadmap. They're like, what are all the things we're going to ship, especially early on? And then they kind of work their way into a charter. But I think it's really, really worth it to start.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quench people's creativity, and I think sort of the further away you get from the really, really high highs, and that to me is kind of the cost of process and rules and templates. So like if you're going to introduce it, be really, really sure that you're okay with that cost and give folks escape hatches. So I've started referring to this as like the MVP, the minimum viable process. So if I give folks a template, I'm like, look, use the template. But if you want to break out of it, please absolutely do. start writing this at the top of templates now. It's like if this doesn't work for what you're trying to explain, like don't use it, but like just know that this is the minimum viable thing. Like this is kind of like we're setting the bar here, but like go higher if you can, please. So anyway, that's my sort of like long diet drive on process. With all that said, I do think that companies, you know, there's just a set of documents that are like really, really valuable that every sort of like, I guess, level of the organization should.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paragraph, and like there's you know, you state your topic, and so anyway, I think the point is, we actually, I think, the more formulaic, the more sort of like mass-produced you're trying to make something, the more you kind of”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I was just listening to this awesome podcast with Russ Roberts, who's a professor, he hosts Econ Talk. I don't know if you listen to it. And he was interviewing this guy, Ian Leslie, who's just this great writer and who's just, I think, written this article that's basically something along the lines of like what it means to be human in the age of AI. And I thought he just articulated this idea so well, which is like, we're all really so impressed when we see chat chat, GPT-3, like spit out this sort of piece of writing that feels very human-like. But what we're kind of forgetting is that over the last 10, 20, 30 years, we're actually like asking humans to be a lot more robot-like and that like we're really asking everyone to like standardize in a lot of ways and like we're making people a lot more formulaic like if you think about how we ask people to or how we teach people to write it's like well there's five paragraphs and there's your”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is actually a little bit of an aside, but it's kind of relevant, so I'm just going to mention it. You can feel free to let me know if it's too much of an aside.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool. I love that. But yeah, to answer your question directly, Process, yeah, it really gives people a bitter taste in their mouth, I think. Process by definition is variance reducing you're introducing it because you worry that the variance in your org is too high. You want people to sort of meet a certain standard. And the cost of that is obviously is like, while you're reducing the standard and bringing folks up to the average, you're also bringing other folks down to the average. And oftentimes the folks you're bringing down are your highest performers, your most creative thinkers, the folks who I think actually don't really need process to do their best work. And so that, I think, is always the tension that you have with process. And obviously one of the reasons why companies introduce process much more and more as companies get bigger is because it's just harder to sort of like get all these folks who kind of don't need processing. You actually want to reduce the variance.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I would really love from companies is this sort of like this time capsule where you can see what their processes were when they were like 20 people and 50 people and 100 people and 500 people because when we were at Stripe we were trying to figure out our planning process we actually talked to like Amazon and Atlassian and Apple and like all these companies that we really really respect and look up to and I remember you know taking down notes from these companies and being like yeah like this is awesome but there's no way that this will work for Stripe like Stripe was so much smaller than any of these companies so yeah they were showing us where we had to go but no idea how to get there and so like yeah Lenny maybe you can you can help us figure out time capsules for companies and what processes make sense”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that was absolutely the right call because Retail Mobile actually has quite a different target customer, which we only really realized maybe like halfway through the project. And I don't think we would have been able to sort of really understand that or even like sort of like get broader in that kind of thinking had we sort of been stuck in the core retool product. But yeah, there's a cost to that too, which is like, okay, now we have these two products and we have to, I think obviously the strength will be how do all these products interact with each other and how they build on top of each other. So we have to go and invest in that now. But I think it's totally worth it because your team can just move more quickly, be more independent, and think more independently too.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then the teams really had to prove out ROI either in engagement or eventually revenue in order to be able to move forward. And then the third thing, and this one actually, I think, It can be quite controversial. We were really deliberate about keeping these teams separate from the rest of the org, especially early on. Now a lot of them are very much kind of a part of the overall organizational processes. But very early on, they're running on their own. They were meeting quite independently with like one or two or three folks from the leadership team. And they were also just quite separate from the product itself. Like, I think Retail Mobile is actually a really good example where we had a lot of debate about whether or not we should build Retool Mobile out of the core web app builder because a lot of the primitives are the same. And we eventually decided that we were going to run it as a separate team because we wanted the team to be able to move really, really quickly. And we didn't want it to get bogged down in what are just the realities of running a product that has product market fit. Like, you know, bugs, yada, yada, et cetera.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm sure our product marketing team felt that way. Yeah, a couple of things. We started really small with all these initiatives. So I think I mentioned we really had one or two people working on each of these products for like the first six months. So it was like one engineer and one designer or one engineer and one PM. And they really didn't get funding until it was clear that there was something there. So they just, those teams just, they spent a ton of time with customers, spent a ton of time building, a ton of time prototyping. And it was kind of the moment where it was like, okay, like there is a bear there that we started sort of bringing more people onto the team. So it was the first piece. The second piece is that we really treated them like startups where like Ritual's the VC and like Ritual funds with like resources and Ritual's existing customer base, which is obviously quite valuable because you kind of have all these customers you can market to and promote.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just because I think what we end up doing is we kind of ended up launching or launching the idea behind all three of these products at around the same time. And they all ended up maturing at around the same time. And that was just a lot of headspace from the org, even though actually the teams themselves were not that big. Like it was just like, you know, we had all these products and we're just waiting for them to launch and waiting for them to launch. Whereas like maybe we'd sequenced it, I think that would have felt probably also just more satisfying to the whole organization. I mean, it ended up working out. I think that's kind of the crazy thing. It's like, you know, we kind of were able to pull off launching these, you know, these three products. And by the way, I should caveat that the sort of the further I get along my career, the more I realize I'm just kind of building on the shoulders of giants and a lot of these ideas, et cetera, were very much in the works and were happening before I came along. But yeah, it was really neat to see how we got that all over the finish line in a year.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, okay. So I think your second question was Was this a good idea? Yeah. You know what? I think in hindsight, if I were to do it again, I think maybe sequencing it would have maybe been slightly better.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Access to their database, or they're actually just like they're trying to build an internal tool and they don't necessarily want to store that data and their sort of production database. So we built essentially like we spin up a Postgres database for you and you can just access it via a really nice UI and manage it directly and retool.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the three products we launched were one was retail workflows that I talked to you a little bit about. It's like if you want to be able to sort of essentially create a workflow, like schedule an alert, run a task. You can kind of do it in the retool way where it's this visual sort of easier builder of creating these different sort of workflows, but you can write your own code on top of it as well. Second product is Rutal Mobile. So you could pretty easily build CRUD web apps with Rutool, but there are plenty of folks who don't sit sort of behind their laptop at a desk all day. And for those folks who had a lot of companies who were like, I want to be able to like a mobile native app. And so we launched that product. And then the third product was Rutual Database. So until very recently, if you came into Retool, you could connect your data via your APIs or your database directly into Retool. But what we found is that actually a lot of folks either don't.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just, yeah, folks can just go crazy on it. It's however they want to take it. I've seen folks actually sort of like create entire demos. But I actually think the trick is less structure in those cases because you don't really want to pigeonhole or make it even that intimidating for folks. Like if someone just wants to write down a few bullets, that's great.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really like asking folks the 20% more time question or the other question is like, look, if you doubled the team today, what would you do? That shows up in our planning processes as well. And I think it really helps people kind of break out of this planning towards the sort of the team that you have, not the team that you should have. And like how folks can break out of that process.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a couple top down things, and I think a couple of bottoms up things. On the top down, I think sometimes you just have to be willing to fund someone with something. Like they come to you with an idea and you're like, look, yeah, like take an engineer and go do it. And you just have to kind of give folks that sort of organizational buy-in. Actually, I was thinking back to that engineer, Brian Krauss, at Stripe, who started, you know, kind of poking around on this marketplaces model. I was thinking, I can't remember a moment when someone formally said to him, this is now your job. Like, I think he just kind of went and looked and went and dug into them. And at some point, I think a manager was like, all right, this is now your job. But yeah, I think you have to be able to sort of like fund, fund folks' time and give them that hackathons, I think, are pretty good for that stuff. It is kind of a moment for folks to take a step back. And then, you know, I think more than anything in people's planning process.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, it's always in the follow-ups. So, like, you know, have people talk about the failure in these sort of public forums where usually you talk about the successes. So like have someone actually write a note that's like, hey, here are all my learnings from this thing that we did and send it to the org at every tool we have a shipped at email list like if you ship something you know you'll send to that have them send that email to the org and it's just kind of an awesome way to celebrate or have them present at all hands and share what they learned and it almost always sort of results in i think a really positive twist”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, probably at least one, if not two, of the sort of three products that we launched this last year were on the crazy ideas list at one point. A year ago, if you'd asked me, what is Rutual's product, I would have told you, Ritual helps you build internal front ends really, really fast. But if you were trying to schedule a query to run at a later point in time or have something trigger or run an ETL task, you couldn't do that in retool. So that was actually one of the crazy ideas and that ended up becoming retool workflows, which we launched just last year, November.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So every year that we send out the doc, we look at the past year, the doc from the past year, and we're like, okay, like, did we do anything on this list? And like consistently, we do anywhere between like three to eight things on the list.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crazy ideas are ideas that we shouldn't obviously do. There's a 90% chance that they make no sense. But in the 10% chance that they do, they will make a 10 to 100 X difference for the retail business. And then it's literally just a call, a request for crazy ideas. The org loves it. It's amazing. The energy around it is so cool. And it's not just product ideas, it's different ways of how we should run our organization or it's really cool marketing ideas in there. So it's just that doc is awesome. And whenever I have like a down day, I just like scroll through that doc.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taking the time to really think about the strategy and where things should go and get creative, it's pretty hard. So I call this, you know, you have to give teams permission to think. So create these moments in your company culture, in your overall business processes where you're asking people, you're literally saying like, hey, this is part of your job to think bigger. So a retool, we have these team charters and we do team planning. And at the bottom of every team charter, we have a section called Think Bigger with 20% more time. What would you do that isn't on this list already? And then another really neat tradition that we had at Stride, we have a retail now too, is this idea, this thing called Crazy Ideas. So at the beginning of every year, David will send out a blank, like a blank doc to the org and it's titled Crazy Ideas. And the prompt is...”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's just no way that they're going to be able to focus on the enlightened bigger creative stuff if they're just like heads down dealing with incidents all day. So if that's the case, diagnose it and get your team out of that. And then I think the last reason why teams aren't always that innovative is because I think thinking big is really hard. And to some people, it comes pretty naturally. But for most of us, sort of, you know, mortal souls, it's just really, really hard. And it takes time. And when you're at a startup and you're just grinding day in, day out, you're just like, you're just trying, you're treading water. You're just like trying to make it through the day.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the other way to kind of mitigate the feel of failure is like you have to figure out how to give folks more at bats. Because obviously anything that takes one year to ship and you haven't gotten any customer feedback, like the stakes of that are just going to feel so, so high, like if you get it wrong, it's going to be devastating. So you have to figure out how to lower the stakes. And I honestly, I think that's in some ways it's kind of easy. It's like, look, don't put too many resources against these kind of like bigger swings, like have them be small T's. And then also just get customer feedback as quickly as possible. Like don't wait until the thing is perfect. And that way you can kind of, yeah, like limit the risk. So yeah, I think that's fear of failure. That's definitely one thing that stops teams from being innovative. There's kind of a like, I think, a very practical one. Sometimes teams are just getting bogged down by really urgent work. Like there's just too much tech debt, there's too much product debt, bugs, instability. It's like massive hierarchy.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of unwillingly, or not even realizing it one is this fear of failure, I think leaders want the upside of innovation, but they're not really willing to deal with the cost of innovation, which is like, look, if you're going to swing big, you will invariably stumble sometimes. So, you know, I think if you want to mitigate that, you have to start shining light on failure. That's really the only way. Like you have to start normalizing it a little bit. And obviously like if an individual or if a team is like consistently failing and not learning that you need to sort of deal with. But I think sometimes it's good to feel. So, you know, like, and when you do feel, like use it as an opportunity. Like don't squander that moment. But I think one example is, you know, instead of”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I actually think about the extremes of that question. So not why are some teams innovative, but like why isn't every team innovative? No one wakes up in the morning and thinks like, yeah, today I want to work on like boring incremental stuff. But most teams do end up working on pretty incremental stuff. I always wonder like what is it that's stopping folks from being creative and thinking bigger? And I think it comes down to like a couple of things that companies do.”
2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source