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Hari Srinivasan

lines on the record: 85
first: 2023-07-16
most recent: 2023-07-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You can find me on LinkedIn. That's an easy one. And I do really, really, really appreciate product feedback. I promise you I take it well for those listening. And two, it is going back to the kind of the heart of this conversation around complexity, it is really hard to know sometimes whatever's experiences because you're living in a very kind of abstracted ecosystem. And so the more you could just say, hey, this is working or not, and the intentions are coming from a good place. And if you have a moment and you're not having a great experience, you are having great experience, you can write it, I really would appreciate to hear your perspective.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first is, I do think certainly there's ways in the majority of ways that skills work is we infer skills. But I wouldn't, I think that there is a skills section on the profile. I think a lot of people ignore it because they don't realize that there's value in it. And that's changing, but I'm not sure if it's changing for everybody. And I would pay more attention to skills as we kind of get in more into skills for stuff. The second thing I would probably do, I don't know if it's that hidden, but I would check out LinkedIn Learning. I do think LinkedIn Learning is a gem, and I think because it's so largely through enterprise, a lot of people miss it. And I would hope you check it out. But more importantly, tell me areas that, you know, we could get better on there as well. And I hope that people will find value there.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product review process Live too long, it gets a little institutionalized, and people start making long documents and stuff, right? So you always have to change that every quarter. And basically, I think it always comes down to the same thing, which is how do you get their problem statement quickly? And then how do you kind of design them there? But the lever that we basically put in place for that was really shorten the time. So I'm trying this thing. I don't know if it's going to work. But could we get to like 15 minute reviews basically instead of an hour and see if that kind of alleviates some of this? So I'll let you know how it goes when we chat up next. I'm very curious to see if this is going to be a different kind of system where we might be able to get to clarity quicker or realize we're not at clarity and then break and come back.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do like to change things relatively every quarter or six months kind of sit down and kind of say what can we get better at. And the two areas I find myself innovating, if you will, innovating or tweaking the most is one is around planning, right? I think every company struggles with this and you get bigger. It probably becomes a more kind of different, especially we talked about the complexity of the ecosystem. And we started this thing where basically we call it like orange and red priorities, which is a lot of times what people do is teams will play in bottom up. They'll come into a manager, a leader, and then the leader made shift things around or say this one. I think we've really started shifting it in a different way. We said, these are the big rocks we got to get done. We're going to get those things done first. We're going to be upfront and honest with you, and these are the things and these are Paradise. And then you can kind of plan from there. And that's been, I think it's relieved a lot of the progress. So I think there's an honesty that comes within that. That's been a big change. The others just are kind of the way we review products. That's always been a kind of thing. And my read is when we keep working.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you one more dad one. So my youngest just hates brushing his teeth, just was like, it was always a thing. And there is, I should actually find the name of the toothbrush, but you can just Google Amazon this and you'll figure it out. It was basically, it's like, it was this baby shark toothbrush, but it's a game. And you played that game for two minutes and you can try to like pick up different prizes, you brush your teeth and turn what I loved about it because I think it's what all great products do. It turns a moment of like annoyance to a moment of joy, right? It went like not even just like you solved the pain point. It was like an unreasonable experience of like now he loves it and like, you know, it was just so well done. It's like 10 bucks and it was 10 bucks extremely well spent so much delight. So whoever made that toothbrush, thank you.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how I went after it. And even if it's nonlinear, they're able to say this is how cause and effects works. And I'm really looking for, you know, once you did it, did you really understand? And were you able to crack it? Or at least did you understand why you weren't able to crack it? And I usually find this to be also the most kind of rewarding conversations.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both of those things. So, first, did they take on something that was super complex, like really, really hard because I think there's only a particular group of people gravitate to those kinds of problems. And I do think more and more, I mean, openly, I think that's a lot of kind of the, in my opinion, the ways the world is going to get better by the things that are really, really hard to solve. You can think about kind of the intimacy doesn't scale, right? So when you think about how people are going to feel more connected, it's going to be kind of a lot more difficult to solve. When you think about healthcare, it's going to be very, very difficult to solve. Education is a very difficult interconnected space. And so I think people who gravitate to then know those problems are hard have a very special kind of gift and kind of a, it's hard to replicate that passion. So when did you do that? And then two, I think people who really kind of understand systems are able to somehow, this is truly special people probably way smart than me. They're able to simplify it and they're able to explain it and say this is how I looked at it, but here's how I modeled it and here's kind of the levers.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do like to ask people what kind of the most complex thing they ever built was. I just love to understand mostly kind of what do they gravitate to? Is that something you gravitate to? And two, are they able to simplify it? And I think those are two really important skills”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I the other one I did like, it's not a TV show, but I what is it called? It was that podcast that came out, case 63, I think it was called, and it was a podcast. I hope that's the right name of it, but it was a sci-fi podcast. It was like 10 minute shorts. And the premise of it is someone comes from the future and it was a little bit of speculative fiction and is a psychologist. And it's just a phenomenal piece. I'll have to get you the real name. Maybe I can get it after for the show notes.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one thing we try to do is watch TV as a family. It kind of brings us together a little bit. We are doing Star Wars with the kids, which is for the first time, which has been a really enjoyable experience, just being able to witness it through them. And then we've been going a little bit back in time. So we watch ET, which is, you know, it's fun. It jogs your memory. These are phenomenal movies that we go through. I think your question is on recent TV shows that probably came out more recently.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's not wild. They can probably see so much more of what happened in the history of like a. Little walk than we're able to just because of that”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is about animals and how animals have different senses out there. And it goes kind of through a set of different animals and kind of how they see the world. And just one of those reminders that we're so limited sometimes in our own interception than kind of how dogs, for instance, they can breathe in and take incense even when they're breathing out. And so they're constantly, it's like vision almost. And it's just phenomenal to me to kind of think about all the things they're probably sensing as we're going on. My dog and I are going on our walk.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't know it got publicity. Okay. That's it. The third one that I just downloaded because I finished, I'm actually going to open up my audiobook and tell you because I'm about, I don't know, an hour into it and I'm really enjoying it. It is an immense world. I don't know if you read that one yet.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Liked it a lot. I really, for some reason, I thought it was very well done, and there's a couple chapters I've reflected on. I just finished it. I thought it was well done. So that's one that I'll throw out there.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first one is called thinking in systems. It's the one I give kind of the team every now and then. Yeah, it's just a really good book about how I think a lot of people kind of be abstract. I think it goes into real detail on how people can intervene at various parts in how to take actions at different systems. I really enjoyed that book. Directly maybe a book I recommend, but a book that I just read that I thought was phenomenal just to give readers want something good. It's called Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I was recommended by my friend. Have you read it? You read it?”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can go to Mind of Hari. We stack them seasonally, and there is one of the things that we found out is there is different kind of laws on how Can be shipped, and obviously, we're not optimizing for long storage. But they'll be on my, and you can always reach out to me, and I'll find you and tell you which farmer's market we're at or whatever, and you can come swing by.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we are doing some with gummy bears. So Lenny, I know you're expecting a new addition. And congratulations again. But one of the things I found when I had kids is no matter what I was trying to do, there was like candy and sugar everywhere, like any Halloween, any birthday party, et cetera. So I wanted to create, you can't get rid of it because like, you know, it was just hard to do. So we were like, hey, we're going to sit down and make our own gummy bear. What I found is this is just a fun tidbit for your readers. If you open like a Twizzler or one of those, about 80% of what's in there is sugar because they're optimizing for shelf life, right? They're optimizing for what's in the store. And so what we were able to do is basically create a gummy where about 40% of his sugar and so just got five ingredients. Honey is the sweetener because I don't want to give my kids some alternative sweeteners. But yeah, we have a small commercial kitchen and we produce some gummy bears. And if you ever want to try them to any of any of your followers, I'm happy to send some gummy bears and hopefully you can check them out.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a card and then be able to see maybe the card says there's no windows in this world anymore. And then what would happen in that world, and you got to list 10 different things that would happen. So kind of that ability to kind of think ahead and kind of a fun sci-fi. I make kind of healthy gummy bears. I just try to take something completely new and have that, I don't know, it's probably one of the more fun moments in this world where you can sit there and just create something and have some new clay. And yeah, that is what that website is about”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you've built, you know, I argue the only thing I've ever been good at in my life is just building things and creating things. And I get a lot of energy from it. And yeah, I have a site that's called Mindahari because it is really whatever's top of mind. I try to do my best to completely separate it from business. I know there's always a draw is a good PM to kind of say, is there a business here? But I try to keep it as art just, you know, like it's completely ardent is what I want to build. And I take on new subjects. And I have two little kids. It's fun to kind of one of them was a book me and my oldest wrote. And it was kind of a set of bedtime stories we did. And then one day I was like, hey, we should just make this a notebook. And we didn't. I think it's got about half a million readers now. So it's, you know, it's been fun to kind of see it take some life and go through. We made a board game recently that I know Stanford Design School.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, I do think no matter what kind of the heart of PM and is that ability to be a builder, and you do got to make sure you can keep doing it.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first, it is that feeling of you got to own your product and you got to speak up and say, this is where I want to drive it. Because a lot of times I think people are scared to do that or worried about doing that or don't feel that's their actual role. So one, it's extreme clarity on, hey, this is your role is to own this and take this to the next level. And when you start kind of molding the clay, people want to come and help. When you start building something cool, people are like, oh, you did kind of gravitate into it. But until you can start doing that, that's really tough. So one, it's letting people know that's kind of what's expected them. And then two, I would tell people to just build. As crazy as it sounds like, I spent a lot of my time kind of on the side just trying to build different things, try to, I mean, they try different clay, think through different ideas. And I think that is a really important skill to have to just being able to say, okay, I'm going to start with the blank sheet and make some art or whatever it is you want to do. And I encourage people to do that because it's a muscle like anything else, right? You can get canatrophy.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that I would hope other people, if they can do it, I know you're making rural decisions on many different criteria, but try to find something people love and really experience what that feels like.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I was encouraged people, the other thing I would say, and I know it's a little bit of luck in how this works, but I think about my journey, one thing I've really found was really helpful is I was lucky to have, I was on the first team that did a hybrid kind of SUV in the US. At the time, it was a hybrid escape at Ford. And I came from the Midwest and it was one of those products where people would really drive out for hundreds of miles and see and really kind of a community kind of gravitate around because it was a very special product. And being able to work on something that people loved, I really loved early on and see what that felt like and looked like and that success was. It kind of created a bar for what I would hope my products could do, right? It would, and if you're able to get into something that people really love and feel that and experience that and really understand what that looks like and what it takes to get there, I think that's actually been a really valuable lesson throughout my career because you can understand the whole path on the way up. And I look back at that as really.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go around a triangle. I think you need three different skills to be a great PM. You need to have a Human Spielberg type creator, something around data science and the ability to really look at data and see patterns in it and kind of see the future. And then, you know, especially if you get more senior creators, I think it's a lot of general management, right? You have to basically be able to say I'm not an innovative across the team, understand how the budget understand how companies can work. I've actually never seen a great PM who's in the center of it. I find the great PMs live on the edges. Like there's always someone who's this exceptional data science and the ability to maybe be a great GM and lead inspire or maybe someone who's so creative who can lead a team in a different way. And I think that one thing I would really, really encourage people to do is understand where they fit on that graph and gravitate to where those kinds of roles. Because a lot of times I think what people do is they think they have to make up for the other pieces of that graph and it leads them to a path where maybe they're not playing to their strengths.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, let's start with kind of how we looked at the world, which is this idea of skills. We have a diagram that I think about, which is skills are kind of on a triangle. You might have heard this one before. I don't know if you have.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a lot about Damian, who leads our growth team, comes in, he starts talking a lot about leading kind of thinking in loops. And so how do you make sure that when you're building something, it can have the fuel in order to cascade and grow? And I think just the framework of doing that, how you measure that, how you monitor that is also something that, at least when I was starting and doing my startup, it was quite something I wish I had had access to. And so those are maybe two good examples of frameworks and tools that we come through. And then, of course, trying to overlay that with real cases, not always successful ones, of course, too. We talk about a lot of the failures we've had and where we probably went wrong if we had to diagnose them in post-mortem.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, a lot of it is case studies and use cases in the same way we teach it here, but a couple things that we do talk through when we started doing the kind of our own product university, we realized a couple big pain points that people hit. The first was it's actually really hard to know how to validate and what the bar is for a new idea in any organization. I think it's really hard to kind of say that. So we provide a lot of frameworks, kind of simple things from, hey, you got to prove to the worldwide there's duct tape in here, right? There's someone actually physically going out and trying to do it, how you can prioritize a list of ideas against a pain point, like how to kind of make a simple expression and how to kind of look through what's an acute pain point and what's a wide range of people you use, how we'd expect data in order to be used in order to validate this. So kind of tools you could use to kind of say if this is a good idea or a bad idea, more importantly, tools to make sure you've went through the process and how you communicate it. So that's kind of one framework set that we kind of talked through.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think everyone told us, well, you know, literally the most negative one was we didn't, people said, I don't have the skills to do my job. And I remember looking around and be like, oh, it's pretty obvious. We hired a bunch of people. There's no PM degree and we've done nothing. And so what we started doing is internally creating a product university. It was a boot camp coming in. We try to get from different models. And one of the things we really learned was you can't teach this just through frameworks, right? You needed to have a series of case studies. You need to have a real serious example. But luckily, we had a bunch of things we've done on LinkedIn. So we started putting a curriculum against that. And then just recently, a few of us got together and we filmed the actual course for it. So it's basically taking our product university boot camp and kind of opening it up to the world.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's funny. So, I mean, open it up. I'd been thinking about a course for a while, but largely it was this concept of I wanted to make sure I tried our own product and I understood the instructor pain point. But it's a very scary experience. It's like, first, I don't know if I had anything to teach my own concerns about that. But about four or five years ago, one of the things we started at PM internally was product university. We had our own internal university.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We obviously have incredible graphics artists in a way that makes a teacher and someone who's an expert who may not always have the capability in the sense or the time to go and make their own online course and get them in the studio and go from there. And then the vast majority of people will probably have access through their company. The vast majority of the usage and kind of the business runs through enterprise and is a large enterprise learning product.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. LinkedIn learning is basically a way to learn professional skills. And so we entered the business in 2015. And the thesis was, it's kind of we think about it as a marketplace again. You have seekers in job. And oftentimes, seekers may not have all the skills in order to get the job. We have this long kind of, we're moving now towards the skills model, but without question, this IRS second order impact, I don't think any of us wanted to kind of, if you will, like Uberize the world. Like I don't think any of us wanted to make it everywhere there. We wanted to make sure everyone had the skills in order to learn the skills in order to get there. And so getting the learning business is really, really important for the vision and the mission. And basically the idea was that we'd have ways to teach people skills that was very much tailored to professionals. Now that was kind of the vision. The way the mechanism works is we go and get the best instructors in the world. We will bring them into a film studio. We'll do it at home in a way that makes the content extremely, we help write the scripts.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they're more invisible, if you will, or they're hidden in a marketplace that necessarily, you know, maybe a lot of the influencer voices may not actually need an access every day. I don't know if they get as much visibility, but I like to think that's been part of the DNA for a while and we've been really thinking through it.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think there's always been, at least for the last several years, an underlying line that values what's going to carry this ecosystem and values ultimately what makes the day. And to your point, I like to think that they may not be the most, I don't know, the glittery items, right? But I'm really proud of what we've done with skills. I think that's like one of those invisible systems that no one really knows. Like, oh my gosh, that's a huge disruption if people can now get people have created. That's a huge way that people have changed. We're really proud of what we've done with kind of values, even open to work and commitments. These are major social systems that we've kind of wired through. I'm really proud of what we've done with LinkedIn Learning. I would argue it's one of the bigger creator systems in the world. It's these incredible instructors and the ability to take someone who teaches maybe is not great Kanuban camera and move them to the studio and give them that capability and take their voice out there. And I think there's a lot of different things we've done that maybe.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think there's two things that Dakota acknowledged. First, it's an incredible growth team. And I think a lot of people that go on from LinkedIn in incredible roles are growth. So I think there's an influencer change that a lot of people you meet might be growth-oriented. The second thing is, especially when LinkedIn started, like you said, I've been here a little bit of time. But growing the network is probably a very, very important thing to get the scale out. So I think a lot of things people interacted with at first were maybe more growth mechanisms than other systems.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think those talent systems will, those who are able to see the whole make decisions about the whole, that's kind of rare, actually. I think most talent systems are, hey, how did your division grow or your product grow, your era grow? And we've tried our best to understand. It's not just about that. I mean, you want accountability in the ecosystem, of course, but how well does this person work across? And I think as we've created telemetry around that organizational understanding of that, how we've understood ourselves kind of just, hey, this is the skill set that's really important here. I think that's quite rare in driving that kind of complex system as well.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The third thing is just in how we think about talent, especially in the product organization. And I often really do try to suss out during interviews or how we promote people, just their ability to see systems. Because I do think it's, again, I do think it's a different skill set and a different capability of how we kind of map those things out on a complexing curve. And so oftentimes.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would argue the most important things to have a single name on that decision line because that usually makes sure that you can get a decision very quickly.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's a great question. The D stands for decisions, but the R is for who's recommending it, the German has to agree. The eyes for other people who may be able to be putting in an input. And so it's basically a list of people who need to be in the decision chain.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as you run that ecosystem and there's so much complexity around it, I think you need some of those processes in place in order to start answering some of those tiebreakers, if you will.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, five Bay alignment, and they've both been around LinkedIn for a little bit, but they're great. The rapid is just a question of oftentimes to your point, if you're running two, three marketplaces, several different business models here, there's a question of who has the decision, right? Who can make the decision in this situation? And so making sure that you have a single person's name with the decision and that person is, you know, you know, that is really, really important because it gets the clarity real fast. I mean, it's more of a personal rule, but kind of one thing I love to say is, you know, if you had three back and forth in an email, you got to pick up the phone. And if you've been on the phone for 20 minutes, it's time to just write that decision maker and go. And that way you can make sure the concept of an hour, you should be able to get a decision. It doesn't always operate like that. I'm sure there's many PMs on LinkedIn who are operating who maybe who may have some feedback from me on that. But that's kind of the intent behind it. And then a five-day alignment is, you know, you should hold your managers accountable that in five days if someone has something that they haven't been able to escalate and solve, that's probably then on the next level of person.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second thing I actually think is that it does lead to your point a lot. You need a different kind of decision making mechanism because there's a lot more ties in the ecosystem and a lot of people who just need a way to break it. And we've kind of put in things like we have something called Rapid, which is a really easy way to know who the decision maker is. Just, you know, you line up who's a recommender, who has to agree, who's a decision maker. We have something called a five-day escalation rule, which makes sure that those items are in. And I think you lead a lot more of those views. And I think that those processes are actually really, really important to make sure that the ecosystem can run.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know one of the things that I often think about is this concept of cause and effect, right? Like if you have non-intercourse, so if you have non-interconnected things, it's actually quite easy not to have to think about that. You made something people love. And, you know, I wrote a children's book not too long ago. And it was fun. It was awesome to write. Once it was done, it was kind of done. And it was out there and it was able to go. And that's a little bit different than here, right? If you kind of make a change like open to work, all of a sudden you're thinking through the perception of someone on the other side. What is that going to do? Are they going to use the platform less or more? You're thinking about customers. What are they going to do with that data? Are they going to your point perceive someone in a different way or not? You have to think through third and second and third and maybe even four, third or effects and kind of manage that as you go through. And I think that is something we really pride ourselves on is how do we start thinking through these different things and how do we start measuring them as we go. And that is one.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a fantastic question. And first, I just openly think, first of all, just career-wise always been drawn to that. I think we talk about product as a whole, right? We always talk about as a whole, but there's many different things you can build, many different types of things. And then we kind of go, maybe there's hardware and software consumer goods. I actually try to kind of think about products by their complexity curve a lot. I think that the skills you need to manage a complicated kind of ecosystem versus maybe the skills you need to design, something that's less interconnected or quite different. And I will get to the details maybe of what I mean in a minute. But I do think LinkedIn is a particularly complicated place. And I do think that the skill sets that you think through and you try to manage are in a complicated ecosystem are quite different. So maybe some tactics that can help if it's something.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you can Google them too. And so they're very, very public, but probably the one that I think is most important to talk about in this world is there's this concept of members first. And I think anytime you run an ecosystem as complex as we do and you think about, even if you're trying to connect people opportunity, there's two people. How are you going to decide right now who needs it? I think having clarity on which piece of the ecosystem is going to be where the focus is. It helps us make sure we establish a relationship of trust first, make sure to understand who's getting access to data, make sure we understand our decisions that are being made. And I always love that as a principle that we stuck by.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. So I think at the next level of operation, what we think about is when we run these marketplaces throughout this ecosystem, the Connect Piotrony, what are the outputs that they measure? So I'll just give you mine, for example. We think a lot about number of hires, convert and hires. How many people did we match? Which is a real tangible way of looking at opportunity. And then number of people who learn to skill, which is usually in this world measured more by time than anything if you spend time for X amount of minutes, we kind of do that skill because oftentimes skills don't have a direct outcome as you can metrics get through. And so we basically look at those things more than any other to say how successful that we are operating that marketplace.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think it's a lot of repeat, repeat, repeat. I do think that's it. I do think the culture has a pretty high immune system now in the sense that when you aren't operating by that, people can see it and they operate against it. But I also think it's probably the... I think when Jeff was and Ryan, they are just exceptional at continuously repeating that. And it's been so consistent for so long that I think it's just kind of the DNA now. And I do think it's exceptional. I think it's exceptional leadership. And I've learned so much from kind of watching it and how it gets operated.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, this was my first product here was the profile. You can make a profile that does a lot of different things, as you can imagine. You could think about how identity could be used in many different phases and what you should prioritize and not. But if you can explain why this is the thing that you should do that would help someone, you know, really do what they want to do. Maybe it's an incredible podcast and send that out there. Maybe it's helping them connect to a job. But if you can understand intent and how this unblocked and why you want to prioritize that item, all of a sudden the world gets a lot simpler.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's it, and it sounds, I know it sounds bigger than it seems, but I can probably, you know, time example again, you can understand when someone's driving on it and haven't been here for a little bit now. You can understand when someone knows that when someone's doesn't. It's a hard thing to lose track of.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most important things connecting opportunity, and we should really understand how to do that. Let's just start from there. And it went very well. And to me, it was another way of you're in these large systems, you're in these large companies, you're in these large, I think LinkedIn is very special because no matter what it is, it's got a very good North Star. And it was a moment for me to kind of really hammer that home that like as long as you keep that North Star ahead of you, you're going to be just fine. And I think it's never worked at a place like that before. And I think a lot of times people wonder, imagine the way we're talking about, we certainly have an engagement ecosystem. We have the hiring business and we have a marketing solutions business. We have a big premium business. You can imagine when you're trying to make decisions across that, it could get very, very complicated. And I think when people ask me to describe LinkedIn, I often start with that story because I feel like it helps cut through how decisions are made and kind of what is seen as success.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I came through a small acquisition that they made of our company, and I thought it was such a telling moment in this first product review. I went in, as you can imagine, when you join a company, there's a lot of advice on kind of how you should make that product work. And I didn't know anything. I'd never been a PM. And I remember kind of taking a lot of that advice and putting together a presentation and just getting destroyed during that review. I think Jeff was the head of product and CEO at that point. And in a very kind way, it was basically like, wait, this doesn't make any sense. And I just remember driving home and kind of calling my wife and like, I think I might be fired. I'm not sure if I was fired. But he was very kind about it. He's like, just come back and exit, I think, five, four weeks. And I remember at that point, I was like, if you're going to go in and, you know, you only have one more shot, just do something you believe in, right? And kind of make sure it kind of works. And we started from that point and we worked backwards from there. And this concept of, hey, I do believe that.”
2023-07-16 · Lenny's Podcast · LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source