Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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."
01:19:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jessica Fain
[01:19:57] S1: What's so funny about this, essentially we're helping the agent learn the skills we've been talking about to influence you. Here's context on my goals, here's what I understand about the customers, here's our current priorities. Help me. Tell me what to do. And it's like influencing you to agree. [01:20:17] S0: Absolutely. Wow, that's really the singularity, isn't it? You should just feed this podcast to a bunch of agents and see if they can do this better than me, see what their advice is. No, but I really think at this point we are in a place where it is a back and forth and where we should be using agents and AI as a really smart colleague that never gets irritated by our questions. Poke holes in my ideas. Tell me what you would do differently. Help me plan this out. Base this on more corporate context than I could ever have gone through myself and poke holes. And I think that that is just a really powerful way for amplifying our work. [01:21:02] S1: It's so interesting. When your tips has come into an open mind and learn, it's like exactly what an agent does. Tell me more, what else should I do? And then just hopping on your ideas like, "Okay, cool. We'll add that to the..." All the ideas you've shared, agents are so good at. So that's the world-
01:21:02 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jessica Fain
[01:21:02] S1: It's so interesting. When your tips has come into an open mind and learn, it's like exactly what an agent does. Tell me more, what else should I do? And then just hopping on your ideas like, "Okay, cool. We'll add that to the..." All the ideas you've shared, agents are so good at. So that's the world- [01:21:18] S0: I think that one thing I'm really curious about, you were talking about human brain chemistry, is just how we can protect our brains from overwhelm. The speed of ideas, change, building is... We are dis-evolved for this pace of life. We were evolved... I love this book, Pachinko, that tells the history of a Korean family over several generations. And in one of the generations sort of in the 1600s, 1700s, there are two wives that every day cook breakfast then go to the market, buy rice, buy fish, buy vegetables, go home, cook the rice, cook the fish, serve dinner, clean up dinner. That's the day. And for the vast majority of human history, that was kind of our day. And the mental load that we are asking of our brains right now is staggering. And so I think one of the ways that we actually have to use AI and agents is to help our brains be most effective, is to clear out distraction, to point out the most important things, to... And I think this is where people really need to make some tough decisions. How much can we really focus on and how do we allow for that focus in the ways that are hopefully good for humanity?