Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:09:58 · Brian Balfour
You've seen these other ones. I can't remember from what company. This might have been Shopify or another who was like, you are not allowed new headcount until you prove to us that you are not able to accomplish this with AI. That's another hard constraint. But you also see these other constraints on the smaller level, which is, you know, executives saying, I will not do a product review, or review a PRD unless it comes with three prototypes. You know, some some something like that. And so that's that's the hardest one. But those are the biggest constraints. But I think the biggest change that I'm seeing is... And and the things that separates out the the top few percent making this change and and everybody else is, is essentially making the hardest decisions. And that hardest decision is going to come down to exiting people. So in every transformation, what we see is essentially three groups of folks. You see your, we call them the catalysts, the people kind of leading the charge, the people who are experimenting, you know, doing this on their own, time, like all that kind of stuff. You then have, your, what we call your converts. These are folks that will make the transformation. They will adapt. But they need structure. They need permission. They need a clear outline. They need a clear plan. Right? And I don't say this in a negative way. It's just that that's how some people operate. Right? And so that's where things like, all the things that we were talking about before, which was the decree, the permission, the clear budgets, the rewards, all of those types of things. But then inevitably, have a certain percentage that are anchors. Right? And they're dragging their feet. They're kind of silently creating friction in the background and like all those pieces. And there's a big difference in how I think companies are treating and thinking about their strategy for those folks. One group is kind of like, ah, we're going to work with them very passively. Others have set a hard deadline. They're like, either make the... They're going to either make the transformation by x date, or we're gonna exit folks. And a lot of people look at this as being really harsh. I think a lot of people would think that, especially individuals. But let me kind of explain it from a... As more of like a CEO perspective.
01:12:21 · Brian Balfour
A lot of these companies are seeing this AI transformation, the the ones that are taking it more seriously as this isn't adopting new tools. This isn't a light change. This is a fundamental culture change of how we operate as a company. Right? And you can't have 20, 30%, whatever meaningful number of it is of your company trying to operate in a completely different way, in a in a completely different culture. Cultures thrive on density. Right? And that's why they're sometimes... The best ones feel like cults. You know? And and so as a result, from that perspective, it's like, hey. Like, we... For us to be successful, for this to be the best thing for all employees, we all need to be operating around the same culture of principles and stuff. And if that's not you anymore, then we're defining a plan to exit it. But I would say that less than 10% of companies we see are taking this hard stance. But I would say they are probably the ones that are farthest along, getting the most adoption, and are seeing the most results, of the ones that are taking those hard stances. So there's a bunch of other stuff I could talk about, but that's kind of the high level of kind of what we've what we've seen across a bunch of different companies.
01:13:37 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:13:37] S0: That is incredibly interesting. I'm glad we went there. There's a... I have a newsletter post coming out soon, probably before this episode that touches on some... A lot of advice along these lines. I... I'm excited for you guys to keep seeing these insights into companies and sharing more of those because this is, I think, what a lot of people are looking for. Just like things aren't quite clicking at our company. We keep hearing everyone getting so much more productive. All these companies are running more efficiently and it's not working here. So I think this is the kind of advice a lot of people are looking for. So thank you for sharing all that. Brian, is there anything else that you wanted to touch on? Anything else you wanted to leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
01:14:15 · Brian Balfour
[01:14:15] S1: Well, actually, just a couple more points on this topic. Oh, We should we should go. Is like, is... There's probably two more things I would say about this. One is that, so if you're a CEO listening to this, I would say that most CEOs or most executives are incredibly disconnected from the actual AI adoption taking place in in in... Inside their companies. I think a lot a lot of executives who have done these decrees and all that kind of stuff think it's kind of happening naturally. But we talk to both groups. We talk to tons of end users, and we talk to tons of executives. The story we hear from the end users, the PMs, the hinge, all that kind of stuff that we talk to kind of using all this stuff, one of the main questions we ask them is, you know, if somebody... If we're talking to somebody who's picked up a prototyping tool, say, well, how many other people on the product and design team are using this? Almost 90% of the time, it's like, ah, it's like me and this one other person, and everybody else hasn't, like, taken it up. Right? And so there's a huge disconnect. And we heard one story, and I won't... I can't say the name, but the... It's a company we all know. It's a major tech company, tech forward company. CEO's been out there talking about being AI native. We talked to one of their, like, print... You know, principal PMs. Person was early to the prototyping tools. This person shared a prototype with the designer, the Inge Manager. The designer and Inge Manager escalated it to the VPs. It caused this whole conversation. Month later, kind of the... It was like kind of still stalling out. This PM happened to then, you know, attend a happy hour where the the CEO was at and, approached the CEO and told the the CEO about the experiment that, they were running with prototyping and stuff. And the CEO was like, this is fantastic. Like, why... You know, like like, where is it at right now? I was like, oh, well, x... You know, x y z happened. And the CEO had no idea. And then the CEO was like, okay, let me take care of it. And then the next day, it happened. So there... One is that you have to go to the ground floor on this stuff. Some of the best companies like Shopify and others are measuring actual adoption and usage. They've gone to the extreme, like, kind of on that on that front to to get a bunch of signals in close to the ground.
01:16:31 · Brian Balfour
But it's just that it just goes to show that, this is... You know, I don't think we wanna talk about quote unquote founder mode, but, the reality is it's it's not just about getting into the weeds of your product, but with something this sizable, you gotta get into the weeds of the transformation to, like, really understand what's going on and adopt it. So that... That's point number one. The second point I would say is, for Reforge, on, we do this podcast, called unsolicited feedback. Know, had this great quote on it. He was like, look. The slowest... Your output is, constrained by the slowest part of your system. And, and I thought that was... That stuck in my head because it's absolutely true. And so if you think about AI adoption as a system, there's all parts of the system that could be slowing adoption. It might be that people don't feel permission, or they don't have the budget, or they don't have the knowledge, or destruct... All these types of things. Right? But in a lot of these cases, it's things like IT, legal, procurement, are the slowest part of the friction and are kind of setting the pace of all of this output. And you can also see this in, in just product teams, which is, you know, a lot of... There's been all this talk about, you know, product managers are becoming the new bottleneck because engineers are speeding up. Well, that's because people are speeding up one part of the product system and not the other parts. Which makes sense. Like, they adopted all of this tooling for engineers because they're the biggest headcount and the most expensive and, like, all that type of stuff. But product is an output of design PMs and engineering. The system is there not to produce code. It's to ship product. Right? And and shipping product is the function of those three things. So if you just accelerate one part of the system, you're just going to move to the bottleneck to another part. And your actual product output, the output of the system doesn't accelerate either. So I think you really got to... People have to really understand those two things. It's like, what is actually happening on the ground floor and what what is the slowest part? What is the thing that is causing, you know, the slowest part of the adoption? Just like attack attack them ruthlessly if if you're really serious about making this transition.
01:18:46 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Balfour
[01:18:46] S0: What a wild time we're living through. [01:18:48] S1: It is a wild time. [01:18:49] S0: It's just like what? We had all these ways that we all [01:18:52] S1: say used to. Okay. [01:18:53] S0: This is how we do it. [01:18:54] S1: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's exciting and exhausting at the same time, man. That's how that's how I think about it. [01:18:58] S0: That's such a simple way of describing the road. Yeah. Oh my god. Okay. Brian, is there anything else before we get to a very [01:19:07] S1: exciting That's it. Let's do lightning round. [01:19:09] S0: Let's do [01:19:09] S1: a zap zap. [01:19:10] S0: Yeah. Ding ding ding. Alright. Brian, I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? [01:19:14] S1: Let's do it. Let's do it. [01:19:15] S0: Okay. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?