Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:54:03 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:54:03] S0: In our last few minutes, I'm going to ask you a question. Logan Kilpatrick suggested to ask you. I think he said of AI studio, right? I forget his current [inaudible 00:54:11]. Okay, cool. [00:54:10] S1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's great. [00:54:12] S0: He's great. Former podcast guest. I don't know exactly where this question's coming from, but I'm so curious. His question is in five years, do you think Google is going to have 10,000 products or five?
00:54:23 · Josh Woodward
[00:54:23] S1: Oh, yes. Okay. This is a long-running debate Logan and I have on the team, but it's funny, at least to me, I keep switching my answer, so maybe I'm a bad... Right now, I'm more in the camp of I don't know if we're even going to think of products the same way. So I think one framing of it is 10,000 products from Google, that's like 10,000 surfaces that have their own brands and it's all complex and everything. I'm not sure that'll be possible to your earlier point, what's possible or what should we do because you can have a product factory that's just going to turn out these products. So that's one thing you could think about. I'm more and more thinking about are there almost experiences or things that are going to be more bespoke that the models might make? And that might mean there's Labs teams behind it making the agent that does this thing that you experience maybe in a common surface. I'm not sure. But I also am not... We have a couple of experiments in Labs going on this right now of can we prove both sides of this debate? And maybe that's why he threw it in. And sometimes that's what we'll do is we'll take both sides of it and say, okay, if this thing really consolidates down and there's a super app or a set of super apps, what's that world going to look like? And maybe if this thing super fragments, what's that world going to look like? And so right now I'm probably more on the camp of I think super apps have worked in some use cases in some parts of the world, obviously extremely well, but I think for a lot of people using them, they can be very complex and it's very hard to actually drive the behavior that adds value because there's so much complexity. But this is also assuming humans are going to be the ones tapping most of these experiences as well. And so anyway, this is a fun one to debate. And yeah, one of Logan and I's favorite, we'll chat on this one a lot.
00:56:17 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:56:17] S0: I love that it's just unclear where we're going. It just shows where we're all just trying to figure this out. [00:56:24] S1: That's right. [00:56:24] S0: That's such a good example of that. Okay. Well, before we get to our very exciting lightning round, Josh, is there anything else you wanted to share? Anything else you want to leave listeners with? Anything you want to double down on? [00:56:35] S1: Yeah, I mean, I guess one thing I'd think about is, and I'm always trying to think of this too, if people have ideas, please just let me know on X or whatever. I still think there's a lot of space right now on how to get feedback about the products and experiences you're building, whether it's in Google Labs or as a startup founder or whatever. And so that feels like another area of how do you listen and sort of aggregate, collect, get insight inspiration from feedback loops. I feel like there's a lot of interesting stuff happening with AI applied to that right now, and I'm sure you probably do too, Lenny, on your stuff and my stuff of agents running overnight, summarizing everything that's happening. But I feel like there's an interesting, what makes a PM great? A great PM has insight about a certain type of people and the types of things that are going to delight them or solve their problem. And I feel like that's an interesting, how do you crack that feedback loop with AI and these new types of products we're building? So anyway, that's something also in the back of my mind right now.
00:56:35 · Josh Woodward, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:56:35] S1: Yeah, I mean, I guess one thing I'd think about is, and I'm always trying to think of this too, if people have ideas, please just let me know on X or whatever. I still think there's a lot of space right now on how to get feedback about the products and experiences you're building, whether it's in Google Labs or as a startup founder or whatever. And so that feels like another area of how do you listen and sort of aggregate, collect, get insight inspiration from feedback loops. I feel like there's a lot of interesting stuff happening with AI applied to that right now, and I'm sure you probably do too, Lenny, on your stuff and my stuff of agents running overnight, summarizing everything that's happening. But I feel like there's an interesting, what makes a PM great? A great PM has insight about a certain type of people and the types of things that are going to delight them or solve their problem. And I feel like that's an interesting, how do you crack that feedback loop with AI and these new types of products we're building? So anyway, that's something also in the back of my mind right now. [00:57:39] S0: Yeah. The question there is just how do you get AI to be as good as an amazing top percentile PM at identifying opportunities and insights?
00:57:39 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:57:39] S0: Yeah. The question there is just how do you get AI to be as good as an amazing top percentile PM at identifying opportunities and insights? [00:57:47] S1: Yeah, I think that's one branch of it. And I think the other one is there a world where, I don't know, there's probably some people in your life just like they're in my life, when you're around them, insights seem to flow pretty naturally and you get to a lot of interesting perspectives. Is there a collaboration model with people and AI that enables more of that? I think it's kind of an interesting prompt maybe. [00:58:09] S0: Sounds like we're getting into B2B SaaS offer over here at Google Labs. I'd love it. I'd buy that. Okay. I know you have to run soon, so I'm going to skip to just one lightning round question. I heard you give these hilarious awards to teammates. My favorite is the TPU Harvester, but there are others. Share these awards you give and what they mean, what they're for. [00:58:33] S1: Oh, yeah. So the TPU Harvester, we just need more and more TPUs as our products are growing. And a few of us wanted to figure out a way to reward people who do the grungy work of efficiency and reclaiming TPUs, harvesting TPUs so we can build the next features and fuel our growth. So we give out a rake to these people and a cash award. [00:58:55] S0: Like an actual rake? [00:58:55] S1: Like a little miniature rake we made on Etsy, and that one is really fun and we've kind of turned into this big celebration. [00:59:03] S0: So this is people that save TPUs, that optimize, make a model of it.
00:59:03 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:59:03] S0: So this is people that save TPUs, that optimize, make a model of it. [00:59:06] S1: People that optimize and save. [00:59:07] S0: Not use the most tokens. I see. [00:59:09] S1: That's right. That's right. Yeah. We talk to them separately, but I think that's one's being like a rake. Another one, people that go in, fix paper cuts. These little things that add up in a product that annoy people, we made a golden bandaid and we give people to that. They put it on their desk as a golden bandaid for fixing paper cuts. We have a thing in Labs, we're really interested of people who can push the model to these frontier ways in surprising kind of ways. We have this thing called the LLM whisperer. They're able to whisper to the model. They get a giant set of ears because they can hear things from the model that others can't, and a really nice mechanical keyboard. There's more of these things too, but we're trying to find ways to, I don't know, encode the value in these Dorky symbols, but that means something. Becoming more efficient with our TPUs enables us to grow and reach more people. Paper cuts, these are what make the product delightful and excellent. And then obviously the whisper with the ears is like, these would lead to breakthroughs in new products. So yeah, we're always coming up with weird stuff like this. [01:00:21] S0: I love this. This kind of traditions are the best. I heard there's also a big thank you one where you get talk to leadership or something like that.