Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:12:36 · Jessica Fain, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:12:36] S0: Yeah. And what can you notice that AI can't? AI is not good at being an anthropologist yet. It is based on a corpus of existing knowledge. And I think the best product thinkers, again, across functions that I've worked with, really are able to get to novel insights through that user empathy, through that understanding and through deep understanding of the business dynamics, changing industry, and bringing those together to prioritize ideas that actually really, really matter. We're going to have so much software we won't even know what to do with it, but what software actually works, what software actually matters, what software gets marketed or sold? Or we're going to have to think about not just that the software exists, but that it can get to its final state, and that is going to require people's buy- in to that idea working. [01:13:32] S1: Yeah. The way I think about this right now is just where humans are still necessary and great product thinkers are still necessary is on the front end deciding what to prioritize and build, on the back end, determining if this is good and ready, essentially judgment and taste. And then there's distribution I think is such an underappreciated new bottleneck, because as you said, there's so much shit out there. Just like, how do we get anyone to pay attention to any of this stuff? Every day, there's a new life-changing product. So I feel like that's going to be a big problem.
01:14:06 · Jessica Fain
[01:14:06] S0: Oh, I want you to do a whole episode on distribution because I feel this so much. If everyone thinks they can build the next sales force on their own, by the way, I don't believe that, then you're going to have just a flood of available tools. And who gets the attention? It is still going to be who has the marketing dollars, who has the brand reputation, who is the existing customer base. Distribution is everything. And I think the quintessential example we've seen here is with Gemini and Google's tools and just their total continued dominance in that market because of tools of distribution. And I think it's really fun to see. I think the other piece I would say that's underrated there is trust building, trust with your users, but also with your internal teams. We're seeing even model companies hire at a huge rate right now. So you are still working with colleagues. You are still working with millions of users, and alongside distribution is trust, and that is a function of influence and empathy.
01:15:11 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:15:11] S1: Along these lines, what I wonder is, we talked about these other two kind of areas, humans are still valuable and great product leaders are still valuable deciding what to build, knowing if it's ready and awesome. I wonder how good AI will get at those things because we never thought AI would be amazing at coding and now it's 100% of code will be soon written by AI. And I've actually been building a bunch of stuff and I just find Codex and Claude Code are so good at actually giving you ideas for what to build. I'm just like, "What should I do to make this better?" And it's like, "Here's 10 ideas." And then they're like, "That is a really good idea." So I think it'll get there. People underestimate how good it'll get at these things, I think.
01:15:49 · Jessica Fain, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:15:49] S0: Yeah. I do think that as ideas proliferate and as there just becomes so many ideas and so much feedback, we're going through a strategy doc rewrite. I think we have like 40 versions now because it's so easy to rev on a 15-page doc. Actually, when these decisions are happening faster, building is happening faster, the flip side of that is mistakes compound faster as well. And strategy clarity becomes so much more important to anchor people on. If you want to have an empowered EPDI organization or company, that clarity of what you believe, what are the most important problems to invest time and energy into, where we want to invest compute and dollars, that is the mechanism for letting people go and run at as fast a velocity as they're capable of. So if you have that corpus of shared beliefs that you update on a pretty fast clip, because I think that's the mode we're in, that is actually what enables teams to build the right stuff as opposed to just the idea that Claude had. [01:17:00] S1: I love this point because there's a lot of talk on Twitter actually just today in the PM community about PRDs are dead. And I think it's exactly the opposite, which is being very clear about what we are doing and the strategy is now the most important thing, because once you have that, then it's cool. Fire off a hundred agents and we'll go build it and launch it.
01:17:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jessica Fain
[01:17:00] S1: I love this point because there's a lot of talk on Twitter actually just today in the PM community about PRDs are dead. And I think it's exactly the opposite, which is being very clear about what we are doing and the strategy is now the most important thing, because once you have that, then it's cool. Fire off a hundred agents and we'll go build it and launch it. [01:17:20] S0: Totally. Strategy clarity is so, so important. I am not in the Twitter verse. I find it exhausting, partially because I think takes like PRDs are dead or software is dead is like really dumb. I find it a little insufferable if I'm being spicy, because I still think what matters is understanding users, understanding business and economic dynamics, understanding strategy and what we're trying to accomplish, and then really thinking through what is the right way to do that together. [01:17:56] S1: Okay. Maybe one more question along these lines, just agents now running as colleagues. Everyone's got all these Claudes running, Codexes, all kinds of agent platforms. Now that agents are a part of the workforce and increasingly, is there anything there around influence that is valuable for people to start thinking about to learn how to do?
01:18:18 · Jessica Fain
[01:18:18] S0: I love that question. We talk about this a lot, especially when we think about identity, security, compliance, that agents are a teammate for accelerating work, and the risks that that also provides because of the places where agents fall down. I think agents are absolutely something we have to think about with relation to influence, because we are basically all directors of work now, right? If we have an army of agents or this hundred new colleagues that joined our team, how would we onboard new junior team members who don't already understand our product philosophy, what's important to us, and how do we codify that for ourselves? How do we take the time to say, "What's important to me as a product leader that I want to inculcate into anything that's developed for my team? What do I believe about product market fit? What do I look for in terms of what success looks like? How do I set metrics?" And if we can do that upfront work to actually analyze ourselves and where we've seen success, where we've seen downfalls, and then continue to train our agent models with that data, that history, that context, they will be better off. But I also think the flip side of this is guardrails. Where do you need to be involved? Where do you need to catch hallucinations or missteps? Where do you uniquely have taste, judgment, frame of reference, something intangible where you need to say, "Don't do this without me."