Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career: LinkedIn’s product evolution and the art of building complex systems | Hari Srinivasan (LinkedIn)

It was like March 2020, and we were just watching COVID hit.

And it was just this heartbreaking kind of moment

where in the feed, you were seeing all these people

by no fault of their own starting to post

that they've lost their job.

We started seeing in our data as you had some areas,

like maybe hospitality was really getting hit,

but some areas like customer service

that just couldn't hire enough.

And you think the marketplace would balance pretty quickly.

You think, okay, maybe these people

will start moving out of their jobs,

but it wasn't happening.

And a large reason behind this,

people are used to looking for certain particular titles.

And they didn't start realizing

how other people could do this job.

So we made a pretty big push

in something we call skills-first hiring.

This was the idea that we could translate people's experiences

into a set of skills.

And by that, we could help them really start balancing

the marketplace with a much different system, right?

And so I think that the job market is rebalancing,

but it's being done.

The pathways are being done in a very different way

that seems to be maybe a change

that holds through these ups and downs.

And that'll be very interesting to see.

Welcome to Lennie'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 Hari Srinivasan.

This episode has a hilarious story.

On Twitter, an account called The Curious PM

tagged me with a request to have someone from LinkedIn

come on the podcast and talk about how they operate

and what they've learned about building products

that serve so many different types of customers.

I replied as soon as I saw it,

I replied asking for any suggestions

for who he thought I should specifically talk to.

And he suggested Hari Srinivasan

by doing some research on LinkedIn.

So I reached out to Hari, told him about this tweet,

and he agreed.

And so here's the episode.

Hari's been at LinkedIn for eight and a half years

and he leads the Talent Solutions product team

as VP of Product, which is also LinkedIn's biggest business

and includes all of the hiring and learning products

which you'll hear about in this episode.

In our chat, Hari shares what he's seeing change

in the hiring market, what you can do to improve your odds

of finding a job through LinkedIn,

what he's learned about building

and maintaining really complex systems like LinkedIn,

tips for getting into product management

and some lessons from his own course on product management.

Plus, we also talk about how LinkedIn

has been able to become a real source of valuable content

and a lot less cringe over the past couple of years,

which I've definitely noticed and I share in our chat.

What a fun series of events that led to this episode.

Big thank you to Jotun,

hopefully unpronouncing your name correctly,

the guy behind the Curious PM account

for making this all happen.

With that, I bring you Hari Srinivasan

after a short word from our sponsors.

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Hari, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me, been a big fan for a long time.

I really appreciate that.

What a fun story behind this conversation.

Let me just ask you how did you feel

when I called the MD on LinkedIn

and asked you to be on this podcast because of a random tweet?

I felt very honored.

Again, I really have followed your work for a while.

It's been really amazing to see what you've built

and I'm a huge fan of different builders.

And also it was a little bit of an honor

that someone, I know we're gonna get into the story

in a little bit, but that's, you know,

and when you work on something oftentimes

like jobs and learning, it's rare.

I think that it's in the influencer conversation, right?

It's not necessarily something

that you or other people are probably experiencing

on day-to-day.

So sometimes I don't know if we get to tell some

of these stories and I really appreciate you

reaching out for that.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I guess let me just give a big thank you

to Jatin Rajvanshi, also known as the Curious PM

who tweeted about this concept

and then just like, hey, talk to Hari about LinkedIn.

So thank you, Jatin, for making this happen.

It's all thanks to you.

And usually when this happens,

someone tweets a recommendation of someone,

they know each other and I'm like,

I don't know, this is kind of some promotion

of some other person, but you guys don't know each other, right?

I don't, no.

I'm looking forward to meeting you

and thank you again for putting in the word.

Absolutely.

And also thank you to Jatin

for recommending a bunch of questions

that I'm gonna ask you.

That I didn't know, sir.

Maybe I shouldn't have, that I didn't know,

but thanks again, Jatin, it's very kind of you.

Yeah, okay, so let's roll into some stuff.

So I actually wanna start with LinkedIn

as a platform broadly.

I know you don't work on like all parts of LinkedIn

and don't necessarily know everything

that's going on there,

something I've noticed that's pretty major

is it feels like LinkedIn's really made this move

from being like a very cringy place to post and spend time

to like, it's actually now interesting

and the feed that I see on LinkedIn is interesting.

Oftentimes even more interesting than Twitter,

which is crazy to say.

Also, it's become the biggest source of traffic

for my newsletter, more so than Twitter,

which I never expected.

So my question is, as far as you know,

what is it that y'all did right in the past couple of years

that has allowed for this shift to happen?

Cause this was very rare.

Well, first I'm glad you're having a good experience with it

and that's really, really kind of here.

So first of all, it's very interesting.

You kind of hit on it.

Everything at LinkedIn is a very connected ecosystem.

And so one of the things that we always think about

is how the whole system fits together.

And I'm sure we'll get into it more and more

about how we build at LinkedIn,

but how you make decisions based on

that very complicated ecosystem is actually not very difficult

because we're all here to help people connect

to economic opportunity.

Like every time there's a discussion,

something I'm really, really proud about working here

is everyone knows how that decision is gonna be made.

And it's all about how we connect

to people with economic opportunity.

Now, it was funny.

Just the other day I was driving,

I was in an Uber with the person who runs the feed

is this guy, Kim Rush, who's just phenomenal.

And we were just talking about this.

And one of the things he mentioned to me

was if you think about what a feed is

when it connects someone to opportunity,

it's gotta do a couple of things really, really well.

And we've done a ton of member surveys on this,

a ton of thought behind it.

The first is as you make relationship connections

across the way, that is a real way

by which people get opportunity.

They keep in touch with those people, they learn.

They might follow someone in hopes

and getting known to them and getting that knowledge.

And we gotta make sure that that content is getting to them.

Then when you think outside the network,

we have to make sure that the things that people really want,

which they keep saying or knowledge

and advice and the ability to get the real perspectives

they need to get there,

those are the things out of network they want.

And we've really, really been focused

on driving those two systems, right?

How does someone connect opportunity both through the people

and through the content that they actually want?

And as you know, when you do a feed,

there's so many decisions to go into that complex system,

so many decisions, but we've been really, really trying

to make sure that we don't lose sight of that

and start tuning all those knobs into that direction.

So if we're trying to get even more specific

with what has changed,

clearly there's been like a focus internally.

Is that true?

There's just like, hey, let's make this feed

a lot more interesting, or is this just like a never ending?

And then it's actually started to work

kind of investment as far as you know.

Well, there's always been a focus

on connecting people opportunity, right?

There's always been a focus on that.

And I think what's happened over time

is we've gotten more and more clear

with what our members really want,

which is this ability to feel close to those relationships

and the ability to really get that knowledge that they need.

And as we've gotten better and kind of clear

in that understanding,

and we've been able to dial the knobs in the right way,

I hope it's landing in the right place.

I'm always kind of, I don't think it's any place

near declaring victory in any of our,

any part of this product, right?

I think one of the beauty of working with that vision

of connecting people opportunity,

there is always some piece of friction.

There is always something we could be doing better.

And so I'm always hesitant to say, you know,

we've ever hit that bar.

And I know there's probably people who listen to you

who probably may not have that experience.

And I always encourage you to kind of reach out

and let us know ways we can do better.

But I'm glad you're having experience with it.

And then to your point, I always feel that like,

as long as we stay focused on that,

and each of our decisions start moving in that direction,

hopefully the product will continue to deliver.

Do you know if there's any product changes

that have most contributed to that feed

becoming much more interesting?

Well, there's a couple of things

that I think are very special that we're working on.

And it's hard to say which is most

because a lot of these things obviously accumulate

and compound over time.

But certainly, there's a lot of machine learning

and algorithms that go behind these systems.

And many of them, as we start understanding,

these are things that people get value by.

It's about how do we make sure

that we're giving people that interesting knowledge.

And as we've gotten crisper on what that means,

I think we've been better able to build towards it.

The other one, which is new,

but I'm just particularly excited about,

we're starting to do a lot of things

which are Gen AI assisted, right?

So you basically can come in and get some prompts

and people can bribe their perspective on that.

And I think that combination, it's very early,

but it's very exciting on how we might be able

to help people unlock knowledge

for so much in building people now on the platform,

knowledge of those billion people in a way

that people can find and see.

Awesome.

Again, I know this isn't like the area

you spend all your time on,

but maybe one more question along these lines.

Yeah.

If any sense of the kind of content that works best

on LinkedIn in terms of the algorithm

that you talk about,

like the algorithm is probably one of the bigger impact

things that have changed.

If there's anything with knowledge or advice,

I think that's what a lot of people are looking for.

Every time we run these surveys,

every time we talk to people on what they want,

those are the things that really,

when you connect to opportunity,

that people kind of seek after on our system.

And you're a great example of that, right?

You're able to give knowledge and advice

in an area with a lot of depth.

And I think that maybe that's why you're having

some of the success you're seeing on the platform,

which is wonderful to see.

I think I'm actually not getting as much success

as I could because I don't put in the time.

I usually just kind of post a simple thing

with a link and I think I could be if I really,

like I just don't have time to do this.

I've just like post a lot more stuff within the actual post.

I think that would do better.

That actually makes me happy.

I mean, my guess is what you want to be doing

is learning and creating and not spending a lot of time

kind of managing the,

and so maybe that's actually a good thing

and it's actually another wonderful thing to hear.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so let's move to your sweet spot,

which is the talent solution product.

Is that what it's called?

Yeah, so it's basically any product on LinkedIn

that helps you get a job or learn a skill.

And we have products for recruiters and hires, jobs.

We have products for job seekers, products for art.

We have LinkedIn learning,

and then certainly we run a pretty large creator ecosystem

for instructors who post content into LinkedIn learning.

And is it true that this is the biggest business

within LinkedIn?

It is a very big business between LinkedIn

and it's certainly hopefully something that,

again, if you go back to that vision

of connecting people opportunity,

it's certainly something that I like to think

is that very, very core to that,

how people get jobs and learn skills.

So the feed gets all the glory

and you guys are making all the money.

I would not say that, but again,

we joke about those things and I,

it's so hard at LinkedIn to separate one product

from the other.

It's really kind of the way we run.

It's the way we think about the product.

It's really the way we build.

Let me just give you like a super concrete example of that.

Certainly if you have someone coming in

and looking at the feed,

one thing we might do is suggest a job recommendation

based on what they're looking for in that feed.

And so part of what we have to do is think about

how someone who's looking at something in their interest

might be driving their job-seeking experience as well.

And then when they're looking for a job,

it's very important that they know

how they can actually get connected in that job.

So the relationships of the network you build

are very much part of that flywheel that go into it.

And then, even as we start looking at this,

you might be looking at a subject

and then you wanna go deeper on it

and there's a course that comes into it as well, right?

And so all of this to me is a very, very connected ecosystem

on how those items work together

in order to give people opportunity.

And so we certainly have,

I think of it from the outside as very different things,

but inside, even the way we operate it

and the way we think about it,

it's a very, very connected ecosystem.

What are the components again of this part of the org?

We think about it as two different marketplaces.

There's a hiring marketplace,

which is how do we connect job seekers

and recruiters and hiring managers.

And then there's a learning marketplace,

which is how do you connect learners to instructors?

Got it.

And then within hiring, are there sub-components?

Yeah, so again, we really think about it as a marketplace

where we're generally organized around seekers and hires.

And so there's a team that's kind of working on recruiter,

which is probably one of the more kind of flagship products

that LinkedIn is always better at.

A team working on jobs,

which is if you ever post a job on LinkedIn,

and then a team working to always help job seekers,

make sure they connect.

And then on the other side, for the other instructors,

the team working on LinkedIn learning,

and just one of the bigger enterprise learning products

in the world,

and then a team working to help instructors.

And many people don't know this week

should have two large film studios.

So we bring in instructors, we film a lot of content.

We have ones in Europe and ones in Santa Barbara.

It was all through, started with the Linda acquisition.

And so we have a large team of content creators

and teams that everyone from, you know,

makeup artists to script writers

that we get to use over there.

Wow, it's just marketplaces all the way down

as you talk about this.

Hiring marketplace, learning marketplace,

the feed itself,

probably more I'm not thinking about.

Yeah, it's very much, I mean,

one model that we sometimes use internally as well

is how do we operate as marketplaces

inside an ecosystem.

And I think it kind of speaks to the complexity again

of the product,

and hopefully somehow how we might operate it.

So I think with your vantage point

at being at the center of hiring,

a lot is changing within the hiring marketplace

in the past, I don't know, year at this point

where it used to be very candidate oriented

and where they had all the power

and the salaries were crazy.

Everyone's bidding and trying to get people

to join their company.

And now it's completely opposite.

So many people looking, companies have all the power.

I'm curious what you've seen,

if that's roughly it or what you're seeing

basically in the hiring market these days.

Yeah, well, well, first of all,

the balance that you're talking about,

it is shifting in the sense

that there are more seekers in the marketplace now

and there are fewer open jobs in the marketplace.

And of course that changes how many applications

you get for the job and how you have to look through.

I think there's a model where people think it's shifting

dramatically to exactly the way it was.

And I actually think some of the changes that occurred

during the last couple of years

are actually sticking around.

And so let me give you a couple examples

of where things I think are really changing.

So the first thing that happened was,

and maybe in my opinion,

one of the big changes the world

that no one's really kind of talking about it

and to my degree is the impact of it,

but there's been a real move to skills-based hiring.

So for the longest time,

and I'll give you actually a really concrete example,

it was like March 2020

and we were just watching COVID hit

and it was just this heartbreaking kind of moment

where in the feed you were seeing all these people

by no fault of their own

starting to post that they've lost their job.

And we started seeing in our data

as you had some areas like maybe hospitality

was really getting hit,

but some areas like customer service

that just couldn't hire enough.

And you think the marketplace would balance pretty quickly.

You think, okay, maybe these people

will start moving on their jobs,

but it wasn't happening.

And a large reason behind this,

people are used to looking for certain particular titles

and they didn't start realizing

how other people could do this job.

So we made a pretty big push

in something we call skills-first hiring.

This was the idea that we could translate people's experiences

into a set of skills.

And by that, we could help them really start balancing

the marketplace with a much different system, right?

But instead of saying, I need to have this talent,

because I need someone who can do negotiation.

And I need someone who can really help me

kind of understand how to de-escalate a customer situation.

And you find a lot of people in hospitality

have about 70% of the skills in your customer service.

And of course you could train up the rest.

And so we started seeing the skills-first hiring

really start taking off.

And at this point, roughly 47% of our recruiters

will come in and explicitly use skills

when they start looking for candidates.

And that's a pretty big change that we're actually seeing whole.

So it's not like people are starting to,

I know it's early in some of these changes,

but it's a change where I think people are still

continuing to start looking at skills.

Another one was this concept of there's

a lot more people who are starting to look for jobs by values.

They were saying, look, a minimalist job sites work.

You come in and you look for a job and a title,

and that's kind of how you navigate the world.

And we started realizing a lot of people wanted to come in.

And instead of looking at it like that, they may say,

look, I really want a job that's aligned my purpose.

Or even by an interest.

I may want something in AI.

And we started launching collections

and the way to filter in these things.

We're still being some of that used to say.

And so I think that the job market is rebalancing,

but it's being done.

The pathers are being done in a very different way.

That seems to be something that may be a change

that holds through these ups and downs.

And that'll be very interesting to see.

What's interesting is it's not like this would change

on its own.

This is as you're the biggest job

as marketplace in the world, right?

We have a lot of professional jobs in our platform

and a lot of professional seekers.

I imagine it is, I don't know.

I guess indeed might be a competitor.

But okay, let's say it's one of the bigger job markets.

Like you influence the way jobs are sought and posted, right?

And how people find jobs.

So in a sense, designing,

sounds like basically there was an internal decision.

Let's focus on a skills approach.

And what's cool about that is that changes the way

hiring happens in the world.

You know, it's one of the things that I think is so interesting

about building products today is,

you know, it has to clearly be something people want.

Like if we had just said, we're going to go like this

and every hire was like, I don't want to do this

or every job seekers that this is not care about.

I don't think anything would click.

We also have to be receptive enough to kind of amplify

that signal and allow it to work through a system

so that it could actually be easy to use.

And so I don't know if it was, I don't think we said that,

you know, or, you know, hey, there was some,

hey, we got to go and do this value this thing.

I think we started feeling it and hearing it from members.

And then as we adapted,

these things started amplifying as they come through.

I do think that's hopefully something that, you know,

I think about a lot is, you know,

let's just make sure that we keep a pulse on what people want

and we make sure that we can kind of get that through a system

at a pretty fast pace,

because then we will hopefully continue to be a place

where people want to go look for jobs and make hires.

What I was thinking about as you were just chatting

is this open to work feature that LinkedIn has

and how I remember days before that existed

and there's people used to just like, Jerry Rigg,

hey, I'm hiring or I'm looking for a job.

And there's always the sense that if you're open to work,

you're not as good,

because why would you be amazing and open to work

and not hired?

And I'm curious if you were even part of this experience,

just like, what was it like to come up with that approach

to how to communicate that you're open to work?

It's been through phases.

And I think those phases really reflect on

kind of perception of how it's changed.

I mean, in the beginning it was,

you could say you're open to work,

but it was a secret signal to recruiters, if you will.

That certainly still exists,

but now we said you could more publicly say it,

it maybe would be a feed post.

And then we kind of started launching it,

we were around COVID when a lot of the stigmas

of unemployment changed dramatically

because everyone started understanding,

you're in this different situation.

And we started putting the frame

and that's kind of the more iconic way

I think people are associated with now.

It's funny, just this week, we tried something new

and I feel like it's almost the same journey.

There are many customers that, as you can imagine,

have LinkedIn learning and LinkedIn learning

is typically an enterprise product.

It works across your employee base.

So we're trying to do open to internal work

where you can say I'm actually at the point

where I may want to next play internally in my role

and an internal recruiter can see you.

And as you can imagine,

I would actually maybe argue more stigma

about being concerned about setting your manager

and certainly there's different cultures

and companies about this.

And I have a feeling in, sometimes we like to think

five, 10 years out,

I think it's gonna go on the same journey.

That's kind of one hunch I have

that it'll also be an employment-driven kind of way

internally for people to find their next play.

And it'll be interesting to see how it plays out,

you can feel a little bit of that tension

right when we launched it and kind of knowing,

I hope, let's see how this goes.

You're talking about how hiring is changing.

I'm curious how PM hiring specifically is changing.

A lot of people listening to this podcast

or product managers,

is there anything unique you're noticing there?

Maybe a couple of stats that could be very helpful.

If you're having a hard time finding a PM role,

let's start with this, you're probably not alone.

We publish it, you can go to our economic graph data,

this is all public, we publish this.

But if you look at tech,

it's down about 50% year every year

and we look at kind of hires

who over a total population on LinkedIn.

You can go to our economic graphs

and you can see the how it compares against industry.

And we don't look at the functional data as much,

but as you can, the PM data seems to be trending

just slightly even maybe below software engineers

and that as well, which is maybe a cop for this.

And I know not everything is perfect

industry to function kind of cuts.

So it is a difficult place,

but I'll give you a couple of tips

because I imagine that may be helpful

for a couple of the listeners.

And it's certainly one of the larger

imbalance of things I get.

The first is in those kind of markets,

you do want to make sure that the more you can do

to kind of form relationships and kind of say

that this is, you know, we can, which is always helpful.

Now, I know that not everyone has relationships,

but you can always try to develop those

at different places in across LinkedIn as well.

But that's one thing I would really, really start to look for.

The second thing I would really do

is we have launched the way now to come in

and kind of signal obviously that you're interested in a role.

We have those open to work capabilities,

but then each of job has a set of skills

that they're looking for under it.

Like we talked about in skills versus hiring.

And against each skill,

you can actually add different kinds of credentials.

And I would really encourage people to add work products

if that's something that they're actually building,

if they add different kinds of recommendations

or other things that can associate with that skill.

And those credentials against it,

I think are becoming much more interesting for people to say,

oh, this is someone I'm actually looking for.

And then the third thing I would really encourage

kind of PMs to start looking through is,

I think in every,

this is probably more personal than anything in kind of data,

but every PM job is different.

And if you have experience in that industry

and you're able to kind of show

that you have experience in the industry

or some kind of understanding of it,

I think that's a way to separate.

And so I'd really start zoning in on roles

where you might see that kind of the,

if you don't have the functional experience,

kind of the industry experience.

And I think that that would kind of go a long way

is how to help you differentiate from,

yes, what's probably more candidates

or more applications going into each role.

And when you say industry experience,

what's an example of that?

Imagine that you are applying for a PM role,

but that particular software is in,

I don't know, automotive tech.

If you happen to have worked in automotive before,

have a knowledge about cars,

that's a very helpful way to get in.

And I think if you're able to show that,

you can show an industry knowledge and understanding of it.

I think it's a real nice way to think about

how to position yourself against some of the other candidates.

What else can that a person looking for a job

do to improve their chances of a recruiter

basically finding them?

I feel like that's probably the best tactical thing

they can do because a lot of LinkedIn

has recruiters reaching out and finding you.

There's two things that anyone who's hiring

is always gonna look for.

They're gonna look for your skills and capabilities

and they're gonna look for your intent

and interest in the role.

And a lot of our products and the pathways

we try to do are making those things simpler.

So maybe we'll just start with interest and interest

and we'll move back to skills in a minute.

A couple of things we've launched recently

and I think they're symbolic of other ways you can connect.

If you go to a company page

and you're looking at the company

and I think they have to opt into this in some degree

and you say, look, you can say you're interested

in that company even though they don't have roles.

And when the next role comes up,

they'll have a signal that this person

is actually very interested in this role.

And that's an easy way to kind of signify

from the early stage that you have interest in them.

And that way when they open up a role

as you can imagine, they start looking through,

they'll have a spotlight and recruiter

and they can click on and come through.

Certainly you can go into open to work

and say that this is something that I'm open to work right now

and you can signify to the whole population

that this is an area that you want to go for as well.

And I would encourage both of those in some ways.

If you're looking for a role, be open about it

and tell the companies that you're looking for there.

Those are really high signals of intent.

The other thing you can do on LinkedIn

is you can actually go through when you say open to work

and you can specify like particular kinds of jobs

and things you're looking for.

And I think that more detailed intent helps make sure

you're showing it to the right place.

On the skill side, we kind of talked about a little bit

but I do think there's a big change.

When you were just looking at title,

I think you only had one way to really prove

that you had the skills.

You had to have that title,

which is very hard to break in.

In a world where you're looking at skills,

you can go through and say,

look, I can do these things

and you could put evidence behind it.

And I'd really encourage people to do that.

If you just go to account of any job post,

you can see the skills, you can say add

and you can see all the evidence and now you can add it.

And I would really encourage people to do that

because when people in recruiting,

they're looking for skills, profiles pop up

and you can scroll over a skill

and you can actually see all those evidence

and you can basically a recruiter can say,

oh, this is why I'd recommend you to this hiring manager.

And I think you will find that that's

hopefully a very useful way of doing it.

I'm gonna lob this question like a fishing line

to see if there's catches anything and if not, we'll move on.

Are there any stats that you've seen of just like,

if you do XYZ, your chances of getting hired

or getting people reaching out

or just go significantly higher?

Open to work certainly has a high signal to noise

as you can imagine, when someone's looking to fill a role,

that's one they want.

We are early in company commitments,

but we are seeing some signal there

that we gotta move through.

Skills has a pretty high signal as well.

When you're able to come through

and show and demonstrate your skills,

we're seeing some correlation

to basically people getting a role.

And then the final one that is harder for us to look through,

but it's certainly important.

I do think we show the hiring manager

on a lot of the roles we show these people through

and it's harder for us to kind of trace that

because of the way the outcomes kind of work,

but I would really encourage people to look through that

and see if you can get in touch with those people.

Is there a max seniority that you find works effectively

on LinkedIn to find a job?

Like I imagine like CPOs aren't finding jobs on LinkedIn.

Is there just like, if I'm looking for a job,

do you have like a rule of thumb of like,

if you're at this level,

maybe you're not gonna have a lot of luck

if you're below this level.

We certainly have CPO jobs that are posted,

but the difference often is job posts versus recruiting.

And more and more senior roles are often recruited.

And so we find that people will use LinkedIn

in order to connect to a CPO and many people who are senior

will say, oh, I got a message on LinkedIn and that led to this

or they made a long-term recruiting contact.

But it may not happen through you finding a job

and hitting the application button.

Let's talk about LinkedIn as a company to work in,

culture maybe for a bit.

You told me that you have a story

about your first product review when you joined LinkedIn

and how that was wild.

Can you just tell that story?

I haven't heard this yet.

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 and 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've 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,

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 it's like five or four weeks.

And I remember at that point, I was like,

if you're gonna go in and yell at 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 in this concept of,

hey, I do believe that the most important thing

is connecting opportunity

and we should really understand how to do that.

And let's just start from there.

And it went very well.

And to me, it was another way of you,

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 get that North Star

in, you know, ahead of you, you're gonna be just fine.

And I think it's a, you know,

I'd never worked at a place like that before.

And I think a lot of times people wonder,

we imagine we have, 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 one of the people asked me to describe LinkedIn,

I often start with that story

because I feel like it, you know,

it helps cut through how decisions are made

and kind of what is seen as success here.

And just to clarify, so that North Star is that phrase

that used of just connecting people

to economic opportunity, right?

That's it, that'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

and I haven't been here for a little bit now,

you can understand when someone knows that,

when someone doesn't, it's a hard thing to lose track of.

Yeah, it does sound vague and like a nice fuzzy warm thing

that people can say.

What you're saying is it's actually like,

it's brought up in meetings constantly in product reviews.

Like you're saying in this product review,

everything changed when you came at it

from that one perspective.

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, you know, you could think about

how identity could be used in many different phases

and what you should prioritize or 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, you know, have 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 unlocked

and why you want to prioritize that item,

all of a sudden the world gets a lot simpler.

How does that actually get operationalized at a company?

Is it just the leaders remind people of that?

It's like painted on the walls.

How is that a thing that people come back to over and over?

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, you know, in Jefferson and Ryan

and 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.

Is there a metric associated with that

when people use it in a way of like,

no, that's not actually what we mean.

Is there some way of making it even more concrete

in goals, metrics, ways to understand

if people are actually achieving that?

Yeah, totally.

So I think at the next level of operation,

what we think about is, you know,

when we run these marketplaces

throughout this ecosystem to connect people out to me,

what are the outputs that they matter?

So I'll just give you mine.

For example, we think a lot about number of hires,

converted 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 learn, spend time for X amount of minutes,

we kind of do that skill.

Oftentimes skills don't have a direct outcome

as you can measure it.

And so we basically look at those things

more than any other to say how successful

that we are operating that marketplace.

Got it.

That was make total sense to me.

Are there other core values of LinkedIn

that are public that you can share?

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 it,

even if you're trying to connect people opportunity,

there's two people, how are you gonna decide right now

who needs it?

I think having clarity on which piece of the ecosystem

is gonna be where the focus is.

It helps us make sure we establish a relationship,

a 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've stuck by.

Yeah, I see it on the page here.

We put members first.

Okay.

So.

Great, checks out is what you're telling me.

What's interesting is the connecting people

to opportunity, economic opportunity is not one

of these values.

It seems like it's even broader mission

of the company basically.

Got it.

Okay.

I love that.

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You've kind of touched on this idea of a complex system

and I want to spend a little bit more time there.

LinkedIn is, as you said, very, very complicated.

There's all these marketplaces within marketplaces.

There's so many customers you got to make happy.

They all have to work together.

I'm just curious what you've learned about building

and maintaining a complex ecosystem like that.

It's a fantastic question and it's,

first of all, I just openly think,

first of all, just career-wise always been drawn to that.

I think there's many kinds,

we talk about product as a whole, right?

We always talk about it 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 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

more complicated.

Yeah, let's do it.

You know, one of the things that I often think about

is this concept of cause and effect, right?

Like 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, to your point,

perceive someone in a different way or not?

You have to think through a second and third

and maybe even fourth order 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.

The second thing I actually think is

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 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 your 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 fuse,

you know, I don't know what they're called, fuse limits,

or just systems in place in order to manage that complexity

so that things get done.

And I think that those processes are actually

really, really important to make sure

that the ecosystem can run.

Let's talk about these two processes.

Rapid and what was the other one?

Five-day?

Yeah, five-day alignment.

And they've both been around LinkedIn for a little bit,

but they're great.

The Rapid is just a question of, you know,

oftentimes to your point,

if you're running two, three marketplaces,

several different business model here,

there's a question of who has the decision, right?

Who can make the decision, the situation.

And so making sure that you have a single person's name

with a decision, and that person is, you know,

you know, that is really, really important

because it gets a clarity real fast.

I mean, it's more of a personal role,

but kind of one thing I love to say is, you know,

if you had three back and forths of an email,

you got to pick up the phone.

And if you're 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 at LinkedIn who are operating

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.

But as you run that ecosystem,

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 type records,

if you will.

Oh, I like that five day rule.

Basically puts the clock on a manager

to get to unblock basically.

Yeah, yeah.

And with Rapid, I don't know if I totally understand

is that an acronym for something

or is it just make decisions rapidly?

No, that's a great question.

The D stands for decisions,

but the R is for who's recommending it,

the A and permanent has to agree,

the I is 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.

Got it.

I would argue the most important thing

is to have a single name on that decision line

because that usually makes sure

that you can get a decision very quickly.

Are there any other really common frameworks

or processes along these lines at LinkedIn

that you find really helpful?

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 in how we prevent people

or 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 in a complexing group.

And so oftentimes I think those talent systems will,

those who are able to see the whole

make decisions at the whole,

that's kind of rare actually.

I think most talent systems are hate.

How did your division grow or your product grow?

Your error grow?

And we've tried our best to understand

if 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

or 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.

One more question along these lines.

Yeah.

It's linked in for a long time.

It feels like historically linked in,

like as a product team, the external impression

was it's very optimizing oriented

and everyone there is just micro-optimizing

all the little features of linked in,

like everyone I've worked with from linked in,

they're just really good at just optimizing things.

And it feels like a lot of new stuff is happening

with linked in these days.

And I'm curious if that's been like a real intentional shift

of like let's not focus so much on making emails work better

and like all the click through rates of everything

and more just let's innovate more,

let's do some bigger bets.

I do think there's two things that to kind of acknowledge.

First, it's an incredible growth team.

And I think a lot of people that go on from linked in

and incredible roles are growth.

So I think there's an influencer chain that's,

a lot of people you meet might be a growth oriented.

The second thing is, especially when linked in started,

I'm not 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.

I do think there's always been at least for the last,

less several years, an underlining 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

that people can now get,

that's a huge language that people have created.

That's a huge way that people have changed.

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 worked 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 he's not great kind of on 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 because they're more invisible, if you will,

or they're hidden in a marketplace that necessarily,

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.

Let's actually talk about LinkedIn learning.

So I know this is a big passion of yours.

You have your own course within this

that I want to talk about,

but broadly just what is LinkedIn learning?

Just so people understand,

because I don't know if a lot of people know

this exists within LinkedIn.

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 and job,

and oftentimes seekers may not have all the skills

in order to get the job.

We had this long kind of,

we're moving now towards the skills model,

but with that question,

this out of 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,

you know, everyone 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,

and we'll do it at home.

Or in a way that makes the content extremely,

we help write the scripts,

we obviously have incredible graphics,

or just in a way that makes a teacher,

and someone who's an expert,

who may not always have the capability

in the sense of 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.

Awesome, like just as a quarter,

I don't know, armchair quarterback strategy person,

I could see where this came from of

we're trying to help people connect

to economic opportunity and find jobs.

How do we help them?

Oh, they don't have the skills.

Let's help them build the skills.

Makes a lot of sense.

Okay, and so within this,

you have your own course on product management.

Well, it's funny.

So I mean, I've been thinking about a course for a while,

but largely it was, you know,

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.

You know, 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,

which was basically we got some survey,

like we sent it down.

I think everyone told us, well, you know,

like literally like 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 like,

well, 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

was a bootcamp coming in.

You know, 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 need it to have a series of case studies.

You need to have a real serious examples,

but luckily we had a bunch of things we've done at 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 bootcamp

and kind of opening up to the world.

And you opened up some of your internal use cases

as a part of this course?

We do.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

I always say that one of the things you don't realize

you have as an advantage working at a bigger company

is access to tons of strategy documents

and vision documents and like stories of this.

Cause once you're out, no one's going to be able

to share those with you cause they're so private.

Like I don't have access to any of these anymore.

So that's a really cool perk of working at a company

like LinkedIn.

Question about your course.

What are some of your biggest lessons that you teach?

Can you just give it a preview of some of the tidbits

that you might learn in this course of years?

Well, again, a lot of it is case studies

and use cases in the same way we teach it here.

But a couple of things that we do talk through,

you know, when we started doing kind of our own product

university, we realized a couple of 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 know,

you got to prove to the world why 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, you know,

what's an acute pain point and what's a wide range

of people 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.

That's kind of one framework set that we kind of talked to.

The other is, you know, a lot about Damien

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, you can have the fuel

and really 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, 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 and post-mortem them.

A lot of people listening to this are people

that want to get into product management at RNPMs yet.

I imagine you get asked this a lot,

how do I get into product management?

What is your advice that you often give?

Yeah, well, let's start with kind of how we looked

at the world, which is, you know, this idea of skills.

You know, we had a kind of, 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.

Skills are on a triangle.

I think you need three different skills

to be a great PM.

You need to be kind of a Steven Spielberg type creator.

You, something around data science

and the ability to really look at data

and see patterns and kind of see the future.

And then, you know, especially to get more senior,

I think it's a lot of general management, right?

You have to basically be able to shine that innovative

across the team, understand that budget,

or understand how companies don't 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 a, you know, there's always someone

who's like 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, you know, 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

towards 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.

That's 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.

It was at the time, it was a hybrid escape at Ford.

And I came from the Midwest and it was, you know,

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 something

that I would hope other people, if they can do it,

I know you're making role decisions

on many different criteria,

but try to find something people love

and really experience it, what that feels like.

To kind of build on that with PMs that work for you

and work with you, when they're looking to get better

and build their skills, other than, you know,

go take some courses on LinkedIn learning,

what do you often recommend they do

to help become stronger and better at their job?

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 like extreme clarity on,

hey, this is your role is to own this

and take this to the next level.

And, you know, 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 a kinetrophy.

And I really do think no matter what people,

kind of the heart of PM,

it is that ability to be a builder

and you do have to make sure you can keep doing it.

Yeah, that's actually a great segue

to where I was going to go next,

which is you say you build and you like to build stuff,

but you're like legitimately building a lot of stuff.

So you have the site, mindofharry.com

where you share all these side projects.

So can you just talk about what's going on there

and some of the stuff that you've built?

You know, are people,

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 Mind of Hari

because it is really whatever is top of mind.

I try to do my best to completely separate it from business.

I know there's always a draw as a good PM

to kind of say, there are business here,

but I try to keep it as art,

just like it's completely art and it's what I want to build.

And I take on new subjects and I have two little kids

and 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 did it.

I think it's got about half a million readers now.

So 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

where some professors there have been using

and it was called Parallel Universe.

And it's how do you kind of have a card

and then be able to see like,

maybe the card says there's no windows in this world anymore.

And then what would happen in that world?

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.

Wait, so you made actual gummy bears?

Yeah, we are doing some with gummy bears.

So Lenny, I know you're expecting a new edition

a little bit in congratulations again.

Well, 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 and birthday party, et cetera.

So I wanted to just create, you can't get rid of it

because like, you know, it was just hard to do.

So I, you know, we were like,

hey, we're gonna 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 what's in the store.

And so what we were able to do is basically create

a gummy bear, about 40% of it's sugar.

It's 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 my,

to any of your followers,

I'm happy to send some gummy bears

and hopefully you can check them out.

Wait, how do people, is there a way to buy them somewhere?

We can go to Mind of Hari.

We stock them seasonally.

And there is a, one of the things that we found out

is there is different kind of laws on how

who can be shipped and obviously we're not optimizing

for long storage.

So, but they'll be on Mind of Hari

and you can always reach out to me and I'll find you

and tell you where, which farmers market we're at

or whatever, and you can come swing by.

Well, I don't see it on Mind of Hari.

So maybe by the time this comes out,

put it on here or if you're trying it.

Put it on there.

Yeah, it's under, it's on the homepage.

And then when they're stock, we put them in the shop.

Okay, so that means they're out of stock.

All right, we're gonna sell you out.

Let's get all your gummy bears.

With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

You ready?

Yeah, let's do it.

What are two or three books you've recommended

most to other people?

The first one is called Thinking and Systems.

It's the one I give kind of the team every now and then.

It's just a, yeah, it's just a really good book

about how I think a lot of people say systems are,

you know, can we kind of talk about it, can be abstract.

I think it goes into real detail

and how people can, you know, 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 recommending it to my friend.

Have you read it?

You read it?

Yeah, I honestly didn't love it, but I liked it a lot.

I really, I, for some reason, I've been,

I thought it was very well done.

And there's a couple of chapters I've reflected on it.

I just finished it on, I thought it was well done.

So that's one that I'll throw out there.

Yeah, it was very sweet.

I feel like I got, it got hyped too much for me.

I'm like, okay.

Oh, I didn't know, I didn't actually know

it got such publicity.

Okay, that's it.

The third one that I just downloaded,

cause I finished, I'm actually gonna open up my,

my audio book and tell you, cause 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.

It is about animals and how animals have different senses

out there and it goes kind of through a set

of different animals, like, and kind of how they see the world.

One of those reminders that, you know,

we're so limited sometimes in our own interception

than kind of how dogs, for instance,

say, you know, they can breathe in and take in sense

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 out of my dog and I are going on our walk.

I've learned dogs like shoot air out of their nose first

before they smell to kind of clear things out.

It's, I mean, it's not wild.

They kind of, 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.

Incredible.

Next question.

What is a favorite recent movie or TV show?

So one thing we try to do is watch TV as a family.

It kind of brings us together a little bit.

So we, 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 watched E.T., which is, you know,

we kind of, it's fun, it jobs in memory.

These are phenomenal movies that we go through.

I think your question is on recent TV shows

that probably came out more recently.

Those work just as well.

Yeah. I, the other one I did like, it's not a TV show,

but I, God, what was it called?

Case, it was that podcast that came out,

case 63, I think it was called.

And it was, I hope that's the right name of it,

but it was like a, it was a sci-fi podcast.

It was like 10 minutes short.

And the premise of it is someone comes from the future

and there's a little bit of speculative fiction

and is at a psychologist.

And it was a, it's just a phenomenal piece.

I'll have to get you the real name.

Maybe I can get it for you after for the show notes.

Yeah. Well, edit your words and add that.

Yeah, exactly.

Whatever's in the show notes, that's the way it meant.

What is a favorite interview question you like to ask?

I do like to ask people what kind of the most complex thing

they ever built was.

Right. I just love to understand most,

mostly kind of what, what do they gravitate to?

Like, is that something you're actually doing too?

Are they able to simplify it?

And, and I think those are two really important skills.

What is it that you look for in their answer

that tells you it was a good answer?

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

will gravitate to those kinds of realm.

And I do think more and more,

I mean, hopefully I think that's a lot of kind of the,

a lot 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 one, did you do that?

And then two, I think people who really kind of understand

systems are able to somehow,

this truly special people probably way smarter than me,

they're able to simplify it and they're able to explain it

and say, this is how I looked at it,

if here's how I modeled it and here's kind of the levers

and how I went after it.

And even if it's non-linear, they're able to say,

this is how the cause and effects works.

And I'm really looking for, once you did it,

did you really understand them?

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.

Awesome, thanks for sharing all that.

Next question, what is a favorite recent product

that you've discovered that you love?

I'll give you one more dead one.

So my youngest just hates brushing his teeth,

it was always the same.

And there is, I should actually find

the name of the toothbrush,

but you can just Google or 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 it turned 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 saw 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 light.

So whoever made that toothbrush, thank you.

Damn, and is it playing baby shark?

I hope not.

Well, it can, it has that feature and has that capability,

but it is a small price to pay for me to get out,

you know, to enjoy.

Good times.

What's something relatively minor

that you've changed in your product development process

that has had a big impact on your team's ability to execute?

I do like to change things, you know, relatively,

like 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,

when is around planning, right?

I think every company's starting to struggle 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 just basically,

we call it like orange and red priorities,

which is there are a lot of times what people do is,

teams will plan bottom up,

they'll come into a manager or a leader

and then the leader may shift things around or say this way.

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 the priorities.

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 with it

and 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.

My read is when we keep a 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 from there?

But the lever that we basically put in place for that

was really short in the time.

So like, 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.

I'll let you know how it goes when we chat up next,

but 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 in clarity

and then break and come back.

Reminds me of a tweet I think I just saw,

maybe it was Instagram post of teams that do standups

while doing a plank to keep the meeting really short.

That's interesting, I haven't tried that one yet,

but it might be nothing we try next.

Last question, you've been at LinkedIn for a long time.

I imagine you use LinkedIn a lot.

Is there just a pro tip that you can share

of how to be more successful with LinkedIn,

find more value in LinkedIn and enjoy it more?

The first is I do think, certainly there's ways

and 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

because 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 sold largely through enterprises,

a lot of people miss it.

And I would hope you check it out,

but more importantly, tell me areas

that we could get better on there as well.

And I hope that people will find value there.

What's the best way to find out about LinkedIn Learning?

They just Google LinkedIn Learning and they'll find the...

Yeah, or go to LinkedIn.exe.learning, yeah.

LinkedIn.com slash learning, okay, great.

Hari, I feel like we've opened the mind of Hari up

on this podcast.

I appreciate you being here.

Two final questions,

where can folks find you online if they wanna reach out

and how can listeners be useful to you?

You can find me on LinkedIn, that's an easy one.

And the, you know, I do really, really, really

appreciate product feedback.

Like I promise you, I take it well for those listening

and two, it is, you know, going back

to the kind of the heart of this conversation

around complexity, it is really hard to know sometimes

whatever its experience is 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, if you have a moment

and you're not having a great experience,

who are having a great experience, you can write it.

I really would appreciate it to hear your perspective.

Amazing, Hari, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks Lenny, it's a great meeting you.

You too, bye everyone.

Thank you so much for listening.

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