Lessons on building product sense, navigating AI, optimizing the first mile, and making it through the messy middle | Scott Belsky (Adobe, Behance)

**Scott Belsky** (0:00)
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? I'll tell you, I get different answers. Some people are like, oh, Scott, I have more conviction. 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. For those people, I'm like, you know what? You're just in the messy middle, stick with it.
This is par for the course.
But oftentimes I'll hear, honestly, if I knew then what I know now, I would not have done this, like, holy shit. I'm like, then quit.
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:15)
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 spent 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.
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