Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:11:40 · Molly Graham
[00:11:40] S1: One thing that's crazy about this article is I still get so many emails about it today. I still get asked to give speeches at every fast-growing company. So, I think for anybody that's going through rapid scale, Legos is still really relevant. But the interesting thing is what started to happen probably two years ago is I got more inbound from managers, and more inbound from leaders about Legos, just more people grappling with change inside their companies. And I think that is the thing that really holds true today and actually has just become more universal. I used to really check before I went and did a speech at some company, how fast the company was growing, I would ask about revenue growth and about headcount growth... Because that just helps me contextualize how I should speak to employees. And I still do that, but it's also become really clear that every single company in the world is going through enormous change of varying shapes and kinds right now. And that is the fundamental underlying message of Legos, is how do you deal with change and how do you be your best self in the face of change? So, I feel like the number one thing that is true today, as true as it was 10 or 15 years ago, is the change is really scary and hard. And I always say, somebody once asked me to summarize the Legos article in one sentence, they're like, "Molly, this is too long, give me the cliff notes," and I said two things. Unfortunately, they didn't get one sentence, they got two. The two sentences were, number one, your main job in the face of rapid growth and change is to make yourself irrelevant because it is the only way that you can be prepared for whatever is coming next. And the second piece of advice, or sort of second summary of it was, don't worry, it's all going to be okay. I always feel like the Legos article and the speeches I give are like a form of group therapy. They're like just a giant hug. Yes, it feels chaotic and overwhelming and stressful, but there's all this opportunity on the other side. And I think that the don't worry, it's all going to be okay is really something everybody needs to hear, that change is scary and hard, but it doesn't necessarily mean the world is ending. I think the second piece of that is that change comes with this incredible set of emotions, like this wild roller coaster that we don't talk about enough.
00:14:17 · Molly Graham
And I think that was a lot of why I first started talking about Legos at Facebook and on my teams was I just wanted to normalize for people what it felt like. That you might feel all these feelings and that that was what everyone around you was feeling, that it didn't make you crazy and it didn't make you broken or something like that. It also didn't mean anything was wrong, it actually meant that all the right things were happening. And I think that is very real today. When I travel around and I'm talking to leaders, and I know you and I are going to talk about this, but a lot of what I'm hearing is grief and all these different emotions. There's obviously excitement and joy in this moment of chaos and change with AI, but there is a lot of sadness. There's a lot of overwhelm that all manifests, some of it manifests in burnout. But it's like there is just a lot going on for people right now, and you really can't lead right now without talking about that and without normalizing that. And I think that's such a big part of the give away your Legos today is just helping people understand that these emotions are just part of your body and your identity reacting to change. The other two things I would say that really do still feel true to me, that I both talk about in the article and have talked about a lot since is one of the things I say to people that are inside of a really rapidly growing company is the future will be defined by the people that learn, not the people that know. I always say, what you can learn by tomorrow matters way more than what you know today. And never has a truer sentence been said than about the age of AI. Do you know what I mean? Whatever we though we knew six months ago, toss it out the window, something new is true today. But what I used to say to people, and I still say, I guess when I do these speeches is you go look at that graph of how fast your company is growing. You go look at that curve... And at Facebook it felt like we were falling off of it. That is the graph of how fast your company is growing, yes, but it is also the graph of how fast your job is growing, how fast every single thing around you is growing and changing, which means it's also the graph of how fast you need to grow.
00:16:46 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
And I think that is such an important thing to understand inside of a world of change, which is that standing still, it feels safe, it feels like to hold onto what you know, because at least it's not scary and unknown. But actually standing still is the least safe thing you can do. It's basically you're guaranteed to fall behind. And I saw this viscerally at Facebook because the first two years I was in HR, and you could literally see the highest performer one year, if they didn't grow and change and if they didn't involve their team fast enough, they were underwater less than a year later because it was a different company. And I think this is happening with AI as well, which is that we do have these instincts to hold on to what we know, and to defend what we know, and to fight for what we know for a bunch of different reasons, many of them good, but the future is going to be defined by the people that are willing to just take the stance of learning and to throw themselves into this change, scary and unknown as it is. And that message again remains true in this wild, wild world. [00:17:59] S0: Before we get into just how the advice is different, which when you go back to your summary of the two kind of items that summarize the idea, one is become redundant and then two, what was the second sentence? [00:18:11] S1: The second one is basically don't worry, it's all going to be okay.
00:18:11 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:18:11] S1: The second one is basically don't worry, it's all going to be okay. [00:18:12] S0: Don't worry. Yeah. Okay. So, those don't feel necessarily correct anymore. So, we're going to get into that because I think that's, as you said, the core of people's concern. That was comforting, and now it's like, well, are you sure? This grief piece, just to spend a little more time here, I've been seeing this a lot in a lot of different professions, I've done these surveys that we might get into a little bit, but just engineering as a role has completely transformed in two years. It's been like the same job forever, writing code, sitting there writing code in various forms of IDEs, no longer part of the job. Now it's talking to your AI to write the code. Whether you're there or not, that's where it's all going. It's going to be 100% write this thing, build this thing. And I used to be an engineer, and I moved into product, and I was so missing that flow state of being an engineer, just sitting there coding, building, and now that's gone. You no longer sit there and just build a thing, you're just waiting for agents to run and then checking, you probably have 100 different agents, it's just a very strange new job. And I've heard from a lot of engineers just like, "I really miss what it used to be." Anything more there about just, I don't know, what you're hearing from folks about just like, man, this sucks?
00:19:27 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:19:27] S1: No, it's exactly... It's such a perfect example of the grief. I was giving a speech two weeks ago at a pretty fast-growing tech company, and this guy came up to me after and he'd been at the company for a couple of years, so it's gone through a huge amount of change. And he was talking to me about the fact that he just wasn't enjoying his role as much anymore. And my brain immediately went to, oh right, you enjoyed it when it was smaller, and there was more creativity, and now there's more structure. And so, I was talking to him about that. And it took a while, and to some extent, I want to go talk to him again because I feel like I missed it in the first conversation. Where actually, I think what he was talking about was the grief that is very present for him now in the fact that he's not sure what is his current job, what is this... The company has grown and so he's in a more structured environment and what is just the simple fact that engineering has totally changed? And a lot of what he was talking about was how much he missed being more hands-on, which is one way of saying it. But I think that that grief is happening for a lot of people, I think engineering is probably one of the most visceral areas where people's jobs have genuinely transformed. You had someone on last week who talked about the job used to be rowing and now it's- [00:20:55] S0: Oh, Tara, yeah, from OpenAI. [00:20:57] S1: Yeah. She said the job used to be rowing and now it's like- [00:21:00] S0: Steering.
00:21:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[00:21:00] S0: Steering. [00:21:00] S1: Steering. And I was like, I feel like there's a lot of people out in the world right now that are like, I don't want to fucking steer. Do you know what I mean? I want to row. I like rowing. And I think it can be hard to separate, I like rowing or I'm scared that rowing is the only thing I'm ever going to be good at, or it's what I know, and I don't know if I can be good at steering. And I think that's happening in a lot of disciplines. And so, that grief, first and foremost, that grief is really real. I was talking to a product leader just the other day who was like, "I don't know, man, we're all supposed to be these universal builders now," and she was like, "It's kind of lonely." She's like, "I miss these parts of the collaboration that have been a little bit stripped away because now I'm working with robots all the time." And I just said to her, "Yeah man, that sucks. Let's sit with it for a second. Change sucks." It also can be awesome, but we don't have to be fluffy bunnies about this, we can also just say this is hard. [00:22:10] S0: There's so much power in just saying the thing that you're feeling. [00:22:14] S1: I swear to God that that is a big chunk of what the Legos article did, was just like, this is hard and scary and it's going to be okay.