Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Lessons on building product sense, navigating AI, optimizing the first mile, and making it through the messy middle | Scott Belsky (Adobe, Behance)
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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 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 the solution you're building? And I'll tell you, I get different answers. 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 par for the course. But, you know, oftentimes, I'll hear, honestly, if I knew now, would 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. 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 Brain Trust, 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. 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Visit usebraintrust.com/lenny, or find them in my show notes for today's episode at usebraintrust.com/lenny for when you need talent yesterday. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next-generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums from modern growth teams. Companies like DraftKings, Zapier, ClickUp, Twitch, and Cameo rely on Epo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to waste-of-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. Epo 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. Epo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics, and instead use your North Star metrics, like activation, retention, subscription, and payments. Epo supports test on the front end, on the back end, email marketing, even machine learning plans. Check out Epo at GetEPPO.com, that's Getepo.com, and 10x your experiment velocity. Scott, welcome to the podcast. Hey Lenny, and it's great to be here. I don't know if you know this, but it's been a big goal of mine to get you on this podcast since the day I launched it, and so I'm really excited that you're here. I wanted to start with your role at Adobe, so for the longest time, you're a cheap product officer at Adobe, and then recently I noticed you shifted to this very complicated sounding role. I'm curious what this new role is and then why you made that shift. Well, in this new role, I'm overseeing strategy and corporate development, all of design across the company, and emerging products for the business. If you look back at the last five years or so, it really has been about getting our core products to the cloud, making them collaborative, making some critical and interesting opportunistic acquisitions over the years, ensuring that we have connectivity between the products, that we launched new web apps that meet new types of creatives, and that was an incredible five-year chapter. Now, with the advent of AI and new and emerging fast-growing businesses, we have the 3D and immersive space, the stock business, and how that whole space is being changed by new technology. The idea of bringing that into an organization and being able to focus on that full-time was really exciting to me. So what is it that you're doing day-to-day now, just to even get it even more concrete? I'm curious what your days are looking like. Well, I think that the strategy of a company always needs to be iterated. And so, being tasked with developing the strategy across the entire company, there's no shortage of opportunities and people to meet and things to think about there. Corporate development, certainly new M&A stuff and integration, all that sort of stuff falls under me as well.
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