Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:54:24 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:54:24] S1: Yeah. And if you listen to the Manoush's story, it's such an entrepreneurial story. And I know that not everyone is great at that, but it is very much the, "Let me try this next." For her, I think it was founded in this belief of this profession is evolving and changing, and I want to be part of defining the future of it. And again, I think until the data genuinely tells us otherwise, I would say that is the stance I would take particularly in tech. What would you do if you believe there were going to be more and different interesting engineering jobs in five years? How would you behave if you believed there was opportunity on the other side of letting go? [00:55:11] S0: Well, let's see if there's more to that thread because that's really helpful, which is, "Okay, this is going to go great. My product managers will thrive. There'll be more need for product managers because a lot of listeners here are PMs, engineers, founders." So what do you think people should be trying to do in that world where there will be more? Is it pay attention to how you're amplified? Is it look at people who are doing great and do what they're doing? What do you think people could be doing to succeed in that future?
00:55:42 · Molly Graham
[00:55:42] S1: It's funny, we had a conversation. My team and I run these top talent cohorts at companies, and a lot of what we do is get leaders talking to each other and helping each other. And this woman who is a head of design brought this problem where she was like, "They won't let me ship code." She's like, "I did it. I basically built the thing." And I was like, "Just let me get into production." And she was like, "Talking to engineering was like a brick wall where they were like, 'No, you can't ship code. You're a designer. I'm an engineer. I own what goes to production.'" And there are good reasons for not letting things go willy-nilly to production, particularly if you work in the financial space, which they did. I get it. But I think so much of the stance is we got to break down some of these walls between what was a designer, what was an engineer, what was a PM? This is obviously a lot of what's happening, but how do we really shed what we knew, which again is hard. It's hard to let go of those Legos, you know what I mean? And imagine, "Okay, what does it look like?" This is why I think the startup land is so happy is because they're not fighting against the way things were. They're inventing the way things could be. And how can you make more space for that inside of a company to me is the number one thing I talk about when I go, which is if you're not leaning into the creativity conversation versus the fear conversation, you are leading folks who are just terrified. How do you get people into a stance of, "I'm excited, and I want to try things, and I want to tentatively let this designership code to production"? So to me, I think how can you imagine a world with less walls? How can you get rid of some of those walls that have felt so important for the way we've done things for the last 15, 20, 25 years? I think that is a conversation that a lot of folks should be having.
00:57:49 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[00:57:49] S0: Just along those lines, just to be clear, is the idea here, okay, I have been a designer my whole life, is the advice there, okay, maybe I'll be something else in the next few years that's not just designer. [00:58:00] S1: Well, I feel like a lot of your conversations are pointing. [00:58:03] S0: Yeah, that's right.
00:58:04 · Molly Graham
[00:58:04] S1: I mean, I think Adam Mosseri was on here who I worked with many years ago and was a designer. And he's saying, "Hey, the idea that you're a designer, and therefore you only do these things," that's obviously changing, right? Now you can prototype, you can have a much more robust and deep conversation. To some extent, you can ship code. Elena Verna was talking about being a marketer and shipping code to production. So to me, there just were these very defined roles and a way that things worked, and we got to shed a bunch of that because things are possible now that weren't possible before. And when you listen to Manoush's story, so much of what she's talking about is the only form of journalism used to be sitting in a newsroom employed by some giant news corporation. You think about journalism today, everybody's a journalist, Substack. And part of what she talked about is the crazy thing is your relationship to the business model. Again, it used to be a paycheck, and now it's every journalist is an entrepreneur. I just can't imagine a lot of those transformations in tech, but you have to be willing to break down all the walls and start asking the questions of fundamentally, what is journalism? Fundamentally, what is design? Fundamentally, what is product management? Which by the way, is a question that we all should have been asking for many, many years because it looks really different at different companies. And I feel like that should be true of every single person, which is, what is the value of all these different roles when you strip away a lot of the stuff that we've built up, and then what might it look like in five or 10 years?
00:59:38 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:59:38] S0: Here's the big question, Molly, that I think a lot of people are wondering. Are there any Legos you should not give away that you should resist giving away, which is a radical departure from your advice over the many years?
00:59:51 · Molly Graham
[00:59:51] S1: Totally. No, as we were preparing for this, I was realizing that's the biggest difference. Again, to the questions I get asked a lot, both online and when I give speeches and stuff, one of them is, "Have you ever regretted giving a Lego away? Is there something you shouldn't give away?" And in the context of the rapid scale company where opportunity is flying at you and getting dumped on your head, my answer is, "No, give them the fuck away." You cannot often imagine what is coming next. You can't always design the future, and it's not always clear. Sometimes you are genuinely giving away the known and stepping into the unknown, but that has basically always been a good idea in every example. I've seen both personal experience and everyone I've worked with and coached over many, many years. In AI land, I think we got to caveat this. I think there are some Legos that shouldn't be given away, that the robots both don't deserve and that we should hold onto. And I think that is one of the things that's starting to show up in this conversation around AI slop is there's just some work that shouldn't be outsourced. My fervent hope for AI is that it lets us do less of the things we shouldn't have been doing in the first place and more of the things that humans are best in the world at, right? Anybody that's ridden in a Waymo has this experience of like, "Whoa, this is crazy. Humans shouldn't be driving." Driving is fundamentally just code and systems, and we're really bad at being automated. We don't stop at the red lights. You know what I mean? So I think, what are the things that we're uniquely suited to do? Those are the things we should hold onto. And some of that is inside this slop conversation, which is things that require judgment, things that require... Then, to the CEOs that are asking AI for a strategy and then copying and pasting it and sending it to their company, no, that is fundamentally something that a human brain that you as a CEO of your company need to own, right? And I think things that require trust that are fundamental to relationships, we should not be outsourcing these things to robots because for any number of reasons. I think things where you don't even, if you don't know the definition of good, how can you give it to your summer intern? If you don't understand what quality is, you can't outsource that yet.