Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:37:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:37:58] S0: I completely agree. Yeah, I like that. I like this metaphor of the major and minor. That's a really fun way to think about it. You can be better at building, but your PM skills are still the primary thing you're amazing at. [00:38:10] S1: Definitely. And I think that's the advice we give, especially to a lot of new PMs on the teams, like APMs or people earlier in their career is it's great you're vibe coding and you're making all these prototypes, but do that in service of becoming an exceptional, extraordinary PM and don't lose that major. That's what you need to hone, especially when you're early on. [00:38:30] S0: I love the way you described it where PMs are really good at simulating other functions, such an AI way of thinking about collaborating. And this idea of explosive endurance, someone tweeted this recently. They're like, "What's so called when it's both a marathon and a sprint?" [00:38:47] S1: It's that. It was like, "Talk to Roger Federer." Yeah. [00:38:51] S0: Yeah. I feel like everyone's in that right now. And that's just a constant theme and trend on this podcast and just in tech right now is just everyone's in this marathon plus sprint mode. [00:38:59] S1: Yes. Yeah. [00:39:00] S0: Man, I guess is there anything that you do to help people deal with that because it feels like it's nonstop?
00:39:06 · Josh Woodward
[00:39:06] S1: Yeah. I mean, one of the things we try to do, I mentioned a little bit earlier, but I can unpack it some, is we think of seasons in Labs and can we think about at any given point there's 20 or 30 experiment running simultaneously, but for each individual little team trying to create a little bit of milestones or a rhythm to the work. And there's sometimes it is just flat out full on. And maybe the best lesson I've learned as a leader is almost to sort of name that, declare that people opt in or opt out of that, but also be very clear when a team is not in that mode. And I think it's like how do you try to architect almost like a rhythm to the year where it's like, "Hey, we've got a big model coming. These five products are super important to showcase this model. We think this model will propel them." You five is like, "It is explosive time." Do you know what I mean? And so it's trying to create a common language around that, which is sometimes in a lot of ways PMs sometimes can be very effective if they can come up with what is the sort of shorthand or the common language. And so we actually put a lot of thought into that too of like, "All right, you all are on right now." Whereas after they go through that, we may be say after a Google IO, a lot of Labs teams will sprint. After IO, June is like, "Hey, just go hack, go rediscover what's new, just go build, have fun." And then it's so interesting, Lenny, because the instinct or the temptation is like, "Oh, man, it's June. It's unproductive. We're not shipping." And it's like, no, actually those are where all the new seeds are coming from for the next season. Do you know what I mean? And so it's trying to think through the rhythm of that is one way we try to do it. I don't think we always get it right though, by the way. And I think one of the things we're talking a lot on the team is, I guess in the past, people would talk about work-life balance and there were other ways this conversation got framed. I think why I like things like explosive endurance or concepts like that is we want to be doing this as a team for many, many years. And so it's like you can't just empty the tank in nine months and just kill yourself. So you have to have a view towards the long term, but also recognize the moment you're in is fast.
00:41:27 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:41:27] S0: I love the tactic of just naming it, having a lot of power and just making it clear this is the mode we're in now and won't be forever. [00:41:33] S1: Right, right. [00:41:34] S0: And something I've found is the opposite also is dangerous when you have too little to do and too little stress and too little pedal on the metal. People get bored and start looking for other jobs. They're just like, "This sucks." [00:41:45] S1: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think there's always something there though, you're right, of we talk on the team a little bit of never waste an event or a date or you can think about even as a startup, where's that moment you want to intersect with something in the world? And whether that for us is a Google IO or a model release or whatever, I think that's always healthy to be thinking about. I got a question the other day on Gemini. They were like, "What's our two-year roadmap?" And I was like, "We have a six-month roadmap on this team." We have a multi-year vision, but I think the world has changed so much too. Some of it is like the thing I saw two days ago is now a project that happened in 48 hours. You can't plan for that in a way. And so that's the other element you almost have to recognize in the moment. [00:42:32] S0: Yeah. So along those lines, how has planning changed in the past couple years? You guys are different from the rest of Google because everything is new, but just what have you seen in terms of timelines and timeframes shift in planning with the rise of AI?
00:42:32 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:42:32] S0: Yeah. So along those lines, how has planning changed in the past couple years? You guys are different from the rest of Google because everything is new, but just what have you seen in terms of timelines and timeframes shift in planning with the rise of AI? [00:42:44] S1: Yeah, we usually are thinking somewhere on the order of about six months. And usually I say that because that's that almost possible window where you assume every lab is cranking out some new pre-training model a couple times a year. There's individual points in between. So you kind of have an overall cadence of where the models are. And then I think we are almost imagining in about a hundred days usually, we always think about where can you move your product meaningfully forward? Our best Labs team, they all do that. They'll go from idea to some meaningful milestone in 50 to 100 days. And part of that is also how do you design a culture and an environment where you unblock a lot of stuff so you can just let people cook? And so that's the other part of is creating that environment. But we think about planning as kind of almost like rolling six months maybe to answer your question.
00:42:44 · Josh Woodward, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:42:44] S1: Yeah, we usually are thinking somewhere on the order of about six months. And usually I say that because that's that almost possible window where you assume every lab is cranking out some new pre-training model a couple times a year. There's individual points in between. So you kind of have an overall cadence of where the models are. And then I think we are almost imagining in about a hundred days usually, we always think about where can you move your product meaningfully forward? Our best Labs team, they all do that. They'll go from idea to some meaningful milestone in 50 to 100 days. And part of that is also how do you design a culture and an environment where you unblock a lot of stuff so you can just let people cook? And so that's the other part of is creating that environment. But we think about planning as kind of almost like rolling six months maybe to answer your question. [00:43:38] S0: So I had this Lenny and Friends summit, it was last week of the day we're recording this, and Dan Shipper gave this really interesting talk about how to build where the tech is just constantly changing underneath you. And his advice is to have a frontier team that's dedicated to testing out the new stuff. And basically it's their job, try all the new stuff, report on what we need to pay attention to so that the rest of the company can not have to be distracted and focus on the task at hand. How do you feel about that as a model for companies?
00:44:08 · Josh Woodward
[00:44:08] S1: I think every company definitely needs a set of people, a team, however you want to manifest it. That is, their job is to be at the frontier and they're almost like if they haven't heard about the latest hot thing viral on X in the last 24 hours is like, what are you doing at your job? So I think there's definitely an element of you want people plugged in to the hive mind of how people are building and thinking and all the model releases. They're the people who have eight, $200 a month subscriptions on everything. Do you know what I mean? So you have to architect the organization where that can exist. I think the second thing though that's just as important is the environment of which those people can build. And so that's the other maybe part of that. And then I think the third part, which is honestly where if you look at the history, and I've read a bunch of books on this because most, if you just look at the data, a large company who starts a lab, the lab is usually ineffective and fizzles out after about three to four years. Or it may have duration, but the company can never commercialize the things coming out of the lab. And so you get things like someone comes by and sees the future and then they do it as a separate company or whatever. And there's famous examples throughout history of that. And so I think there is this interesting balance of can you have a team of people who live at the frontier like Dan says, who are building frontier things but can somehow bridge or connect across the bigger company in a way that it's not, oh, that's just some weird R&D group always coming up with gimmicks and toys? Do you know what I mean? And so I think it takes a certain person or a certain set of people who can actually be like, "Hey, that thing looks like a toy right now. That's going to be essential to our future in five years." And that's actually where, at least studying history, where sometimes these frontier ideas fall short, you can get the first two things right and then fail on the third one and then the whole thing really doesn't matter. Do you know what I mean?