Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin
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The way I learned how to pitch in business school, I think way most people did is what I call the arrogant doctor. So you have a problem, a pain, I have a solution, you know, a treatment, and I'm going to tell you why it's better than all the other treatments. And the structure that I read about in these movies was different. Every movie starts with some kind of shift in the world, and I call this shift, the shift from old game to new game. And the archetypal example of this, I think, in the business world is what Benioff did with Salesforce. So he comes in and he says, "Hey, software is over." And there's this new world called the cloud, a new game, new rules, you know, that's the new way to win, and we're going to help you if you're in there. This structure really is about defining a movement, and that's very different from, "Hey, I'm going to solve your problem." 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 Andy Raskin. Andy helps CEOs and company leaders align their teams around something he calls a strategic narrative, which, as you'll learn all about in this episode, is essentially a simple story that helps people understand why they need your product. And with that, helps you align your sales, marketing and product teams, along with your fundraising, and even your hiring efforts. Andy has worked closely with some of the most successful founders and companies out there, including companies like GONG, Dropbox, Uber, Salesforce, Square, IBM, and many others. In her conversation, Andy explains why most people are pitching their product completely wrong, why focusing on the problem you're solving for people is no longer an effective pitch, and how this strategic narrative helps you frame your solution in a much more effective way. Andy also shares a ton of examples of the framework of action, why focusing on categories and category creation is so limiting, signs your narrative needs to work, and so much more. Enjoy this episode with Andy Raskin after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by CODA. You've heard me talk about how CODA is the doc that brings it all together, and how it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this first hand, because CODA does that for me. I use CODA every day to wrangle my newsletter content calendar, my interview notes for podcasts, and to coordinate my sponsors. More recently, I actually wrote a whole post on how CODA's product team operates, and within that post, they shared a dozen templates that they use internally to run their product team, including managing a roadmap, their OKI process, getting internal feedback, and essentially their whole product development process is done within CODA. If your team's work is spread out across different documents and spreadsheets and a stack of workload tools, that's why you need CODA. CODA puts data in one centralized location, regardless of format, eliminating roadblocks that can slow your team down. CODA allows your team to operate on the same information and collaborate in one place. Take advantage of this special limited time offer, just for startups. Line up today at coda.io/lenny and get a $1,000 startup credit on your first statement, that's c-o-v-a.io/lenny to sign up and get a startup credit of $1,000, coda.io/lenny. Are you hiring, or on the flipside, are you looking for a new opportunity? Well, either way, check out lenny'sjobs.com/talent. If you're a hiring manager, you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand-curated people who are open to new opportunities. Thousands of people apply to join this collective, and I personally review and accept just about 10% of them. You won't find a better place to hire product managers and growth leaders. Join almost a hundred other companies who are actively hiring through this collective. And if you're looking around for a new opportunity, actively or passively, join the collective. It's free, you can be anonymous, and you can even hide yourself from specific companies. You can also leave any time, and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from. Check out lenny'sjobs.com/talent. Andy, welcome to the podcast. Oh, thanks, Lenny. So great to talk to you. So you're quite known as someone that helps C.O.'s optimize their pitch, their story, their strategy, which we're going to get deep into, but before we do that, can you just give us a little glimpse into how you found your way into this line of work? So I started as a coder. I was a computer science major, undergrad. A friend and I had an idea for an app. So this was like during the dot com years, so Windows app. And we coded a little prototype, and we started, we put it out there, we started getting some users. And we thought, okay, maybe we can get some investment. So of the two of us, I spoke English fluently, so we decided, okay, I'll write the investor pitch. So I wrote the pitch, sent it out, and the reaction was really bad.
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