Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:46:12 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:46:12] S0: Yeah. It's interesting as just even Anthropic has a labs team, the most cutting edge company, they're just at the frontier already. They're like, "Okay, but we also need a labs team to actually watch the frontier frontier." [00:46:25] S1: Yeah, that's right. Well, one thing we joke about too inside as Labs has grown now and we've had a few projects thankfully have kind of hit and are lots of users now and growing, we've actually internally to this point of common language, what we started to find was a bigger project like Notebook in terms of users or Flow or AI Studio or these things that are grown out of Labs. In some ways there's a risk they crowd out the zero to one stuff. And so the terms we've started using is there's zero to one Labs, there's one to 10 Labs, and there's 10 to 100. And these may not mean anything to your audience, but to us, we actually have kind of encoded these are different stages of the Labs life cycle and we want all of these products to have this innovative energy that's common, but inside each of those stages, there's very different challenges and very different things you're optimizing for. And in zero to one, you're looking at eyeballs like we talked about. And in maybe 10 to 100, you're looking at waterfalls and CPAs and thinking about how are we actually converting people to these magic moments in the product? And it's a scaling game in a lot of way.
00:47:37 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:47:37] S0: Say someone listening is convinced they should set up a frontier team, a Labs team, and it feels like Labs teams have evolved a little bit and it used to be build the next big business unit is the idea here. It's like, okay, what's a new technology that is unlocking something or a core business? I wonder if that's true, but that's what it feels like to me. But I guess just with that in mind, what are maybe three tips for someone that wants to set up a Labs team internally?
00:48:01 · Josh Woodward
[00:48:01] S1: Yeah. I think one, you've got to try to create a space where weird things can grow and you can't just nestle this under an existing business unit. It has to have its own kind of independence is one. And in some companies that means it needs to report to the CEO or it needs to report into enough of a distance in a way. And we can go into that if you want, but that's super important. I think the second thing is a set of people, and in the case of us, this was this user's first, Google second, Labs third thinking where the job of the lab is to make users successful and make Google successful. It's not to make itself successful. And so there's a bit of maybe a humility or a collaboration or this mindset of what does success look like? And I think for us, how we've broken that down and how I would encourage companies to think about it is your goal of this labs to graduate things to existing products or is your goal to go invent new product lines and categories? And in our case, we started and it was a graduation lab and it's expanded over time as we've started to realize AI really transforms and blurs a lot of categories. But being very clear about what game you're playing and what does winning or losing look like would be the second thing. So isolated in some way, but also part of the same team. And I think the third thing, and we talk about this a little bit on Labs is, and I can imagine for maybe CEOs listening or other kind of C-suite people, use your lab not just for product development or technology exploration, but even for challenging how the company works and almost the way things happen. And that's actually the phrase we use on the team is Labs sometimes creates good trouble at Google. So there's bad trouble you don't want to create, but good trouble, give you an example. We were one of the first teams that were like, we're seeing the job roles blur. We have to have a builder job ladder and we need to think about it differently and we should use Labs as the place to pilot it before we roll it out across Google. And so that's another way you can think of the multidimensionality of a lab in a way.
00:50:20 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:50:20] S0: You just think about the processes and ways of working, not just products necessarily. That's really interesting. [00:50:26] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [00:50:26] S0: What about the type of people that you would put on this lab team? You mentioned this unlearning rate is a really interesting way to think about. What do you look for and what's a person you want to avoid on the lab team? [00:50:35] S1: Yeah, yeah. Great one. Man, we are obsessed about finding people who just can't stop themselves from building. I mentioned that earlier. We have a whole doc on the team, Labs in a nutshell. We have one on Gemini too, Gemini in a nutshell. The first week someone joins the team, I email it to them. And most of them have seen it before as part of some of our hiring screening too. They build all the time. They're intellectually curious. They're reading, they're on X, they're listening to podcasts. They are obsessed about solving people's problems, not about their own ego or glory. They are the people when you're around them, they add energy. You leave a conversation, you're like, "I want to be with that person. I'll run through a wall with that person." Do you know what I mean? We've got 17 or 18 of them. Maybe I can send some of them to you after if you want to include in the show notes. [00:51:29] S0: I'd love that.
00:51:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:51:29] S0: I'd love that. [00:51:29] S1: Yeah, but it's such an important part. And that third thing I talked about as a tip for setting up a lab, it's not just about job ladders and stuff. It's literally about who are the people of the future that you are trying to bring in that are going to think different and challenge things different. And it's a different type. And what we've also found is these products have grown, the zero to one people are different a little bit than the one to 10 and the 10 to 100 too. So it's like, how do you create some commonality? But I do think when you're talking to someone, you're looking at... In an interview, if I'm talking to someone, they're like, "Hey, let me show you this thing I just built." Instant credibility. Or if they're like... I'll ask them questions about unknown, unstructured, dark caves, these events where they don't know which ways forward, how do they figure it out? People that are energized by that huge credibility boost. So yeah, there's definitely a certain type that you're looking for. [00:52:27] S0: In terms of the org structure, what's the biggest mistake people make?
00:52:27 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:52:27] S0: In terms of the org structure, what's the biggest mistake people make? [00:52:30] S1: Yeah, I think it's actually, I'll give you a live one we're talking about right now. It's like we're trying to figure out how much you isolate different subteams in going after things versus try to create groupings of thematic things. For example, we've talked about interactive entertainment as an area or a pond we're interested in fishing in. And it's like, do you do that as one set of people doing that? Is five people just take five shots at it? So a mistake sometimes I think is people maybe rush to a group and maybe the bias is towards consolidate, make it clean. And I think what I've learned maybe the hard way over the years is actually sometimes you have to live in the messiness a little bit and almost see what emerges, but still be willing to make those kind of changes. Those are really org design team kind of things. The other thing I'd say sometimes is a common mistake in you hire too many people too fast. This happens at big companies, it happens at startups too. And it can be so addicting to sometimes look at like, oh, our team doubled or tripled in the last quarter or six months or whatever. And these are just vanity metrics that are really bad most of the time. So I think that's the other thing is a common mistake. I remember I was on a project years ago and we got to 30 engineers and I was so happy and we had zero product market fit, but a very inspiring vision. And you probably know the outcome of how that ended basically.