Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:02:30 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
So those are just examples for me. I bet you have some too, but to me, that is one of the biggest things I've been thinking about lately is as of today, I think there's some stuff we just shouldn't give away. [01:02:44] S0: Breaking news. That's what a departure from this. How many years ago did you write this? 13 years? [01:02:52] S1: Yeah, 13. [01:02:53] S0: Wow. That's something. That's a sign of- [01:02:56] S1: A sign of the times. [01:02:57] S0: ... the change we're living through that now there's some [inaudible 01:02:59] [01:02:59] S1: Hold on to some of them. [01:03:01] S0: Yeah. So interesting. There's a few thoughts I had here while you were talking. This is almost a discussion around what should AI do? Where do you want AI to be involved and where you not want it involved? One framework I've loved is this idea of you want AI in the middle of stuff. You want to be at the top coming up just like, here's kind of where we want to go and here's the idea, here's what I'm thinking. And then AI does a bunch of stuff, and then you review it, iterate until it's done. [01:03:29] S1: Sandwich. [01:03:31] S0: AI sandwich. [01:03:32] S1: Sandwich, Lenny. [01:03:33] S0: The human sandwich. [01:03:35] S1: Yeah, dude. [01:03:36] S0: Oh, man. [01:03:39] S1: Okay, we're getting there. We're getting a metaphor.
01:03:39 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:39] S1: Okay, we're getting there. We're getting a metaphor. [01:03:39] S0: That's the best answer. The other is something Tara, I just thought of as you were talking. So Tara shared this really good perspective that humans are going to be necessary to help guide us towards a world we want to have, a product we want to build versus the most optimal AI version. I think I was a longtime Airbnb person, nothing personal, but Booking.com, if you've seen it, a very different experience than Airbnb. Booking.com, their whole philosophy, let's optimize the shit out of every second of interaction. So it's just all these upsells and pressure and stress just like, "Oh, my God, only one spot left. You have five seconds left. Just book a hundred times, 100 people book it." [01:04:22] S1: Sounds stressful. [01:04:24] S0: It's so stressful, but so effective. You go there, you're like, "Oh, shit I got to book this right now." [01:04:28] S1: You're like, "I didn't even know I was booking it, but I booked it." [01:04:30] S0: I'm going to Japan. There's only one spot left. But it's so good. It's so effective at getting you to book. Booking.com appropriate. And it worked, and it's doing great as a business. So good idea, good stuff guys. Airbnb has always been, we don't want to become that. We want it to feel really nice, to have a great experience, feel good. So I think that's a big part of the answer as you were talking, made me realize is humans are there to guide towards the world we want.
01:04:30 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[01:04:30] S0: I'm going to Japan. There's only one spot left. But it's so good. It's so effective at getting you to book. Booking.com appropriate. And it worked, and it's doing great as a business. So good idea, good stuff guys. Airbnb has always been, we don't want to become that. We want it to feel really nice, to have a great experience, feel good. So I think that's a big part of the answer as you were talking, made me realize is humans are there to guide towards the world we want. [01:05:01] S1: Yeah. And to some extent what you're talking about is taste, that there is a big difference between something that's okay and something that's phenomenal. [01:05:11] S0: I think it's even beyond taste. I think it's like a vision. It's like, "What is your vision of where this should be?" Because you could say, people at booking.com, they have taste for a specific type. It's like a different kind of taste. But it's like, "Yeah, what do you want? What do you want this to be?"