Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:48:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Zevi Arnovitz
[00:48:26] S0: Amazing. Okay. Is there anything else there before I move in a couple other directions? [00:48:31] S1: I think that's it. I think we covered pretty much everything. Basically, just to wrap this up, what I do is I do a bunch of code review and then update the documentation so that everything is documented. So the next time I try to build a feature in this area, there won't be any mistakes. And then I'll do a bunch of testing. I'll do some user testing as well before I release this to general availability. Obviously we're not going to release this. This was just a show, but hopefully maybe by the time the podcast comes out, I'll have done this correctly and release the feature. [00:48:59] S0: It's incredible that this was not possible, I don't know, two years ago, maybe a year ago, you are a product manager shipping a product without knowing how to write code, barely knowing how to review code. You said you're afraid of looking at code. As a product manager, you're building a product in Cursor using all of these different AI models. You're making money with this product. We're so used to this now, but it's insane what is now possible.
00:48:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Zevi Arnovitz
[00:48:59] S0: It's incredible that this was not possible, I don't know, two years ago, maybe a year ago, you are a product manager shipping a product without knowing how to write code, barely knowing how to review code. You said you're afraid of looking at code. As a product manager, you're building a product in Cursor using all of these different AI models. You're making money with this product. We're so used to this now, but it's insane what is now possible. [00:49:29] S1: It's the best time to be live. 100%. I think that I understand the fear, but AI just makes it so much possible. Just a quick side note here, my brother, who I'm building one of the apps with is an entrepreneur. He has a beautiful business that helps old people and seniors understand to use technology and AI better. And he's basically doing the same kind of learning as me, and he's replaced all of the tools he was paying for. I think he was paying for Zapier and Airtable, and he's basically built a full-fledged CRM system and automation system for his business completely alone. So for the people who are curious, optimistic, hardworking, this is the best time to be a builder. [00:50:14] S0: And what I love about this conversation we're having here is it feels like the biggest barrier for a lot of people is like, how do I get started? What exactly do I do? I open up cursor. It looks very intimidating. I don't know how to write code. I don't know how to build stuff. I don't know about databases. And so you're going to be sharing all these /commands and basically this whole workflow with the audience.
00:50:14 · Lenny Rachitsky, Zevi Arnovitz
[00:50:14] S0: And what I love about this conversation we're having here is it feels like the biggest barrier for a lot of people is like, how do I get started? What exactly do I do? I open up cursor. It looks very intimidating. I don't know how to write code. I don't know how to build stuff. I don't know about databases. And so you're going to be sharing all these /commands and basically this whole workflow with the audience. [00:50:34] S1: Yeah. [00:50:36] S0: Okay. [00:50:37] S1: And like I said, just start at GPT. Start on GPT, tell it what your idea is, tell it to explain to you what are even the first steps of thinking, what are the decisions you need to make? And just be inquisitive, learn. Don't rush things. It's very important to just dive in and really spend the time to learn. [00:50:56] S0: And you share this. One of your /commands is learning opportunity, and it's how you learn a lot of these things. Just teach me this thing and how this database issue works. [00:51:04] S1: Exactly. [00:51:05] S0: Okay. There's a couple directions I want to make sure we touch on. One is coming back to a question I asked earlier about how this might work at a larger company. Say it's not like Meta, but just like, I don't know, a thousand person company, 500 people. How much of this can you plug and play into a workflow as a PM at a larger company? What would be your advice for someone that may want to start trying to ship code, at least showing people what's possible?
00:51:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Zevi Arnovitz
[00:51:05] S0: Okay. There's a couple directions I want to make sure we touch on. One is coming back to a question I asked earlier about how this might work at a larger company. Say it's not like Meta, but just like, I don't know, a thousand person company, 500 people. How much of this can you plug and play into a workflow as a PM at a larger company? What would be your advice for someone that may want to start trying to ship code, at least showing people what's possible? [00:51:28] S1: I think that first making your code base AI native is a really important step, and I think this needs to be done by technical people. So basically my codebase has a ton of just plain text in it. So it will have a bunch of markdown files that explain to agents how to work in certain areas of the code base and high level structure so that the agents navigate through the code base easier. And I think that if this is set up in a really good way, I still don't think PMs should be shipping heavy database chain migrations or any big project, but contained UI projects, especially if you just build it, create the PR and send it to a dev to do the final finishes. I think that's definitely something that's possible. And I think we're going to see that a lot in the next coming years. I think basically everyone's going to become a builder, so it should be really interesting.
00:51:28 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:51:28] S1: I think that first making your code base AI native is a really important step, and I think this needs to be done by technical people. So basically my codebase has a ton of just plain text in it. So it will have a bunch of markdown files that explain to agents how to work in certain areas of the code base and high level structure so that the agents navigate through the code base easier. And I think that if this is set up in a really good way, I still don't think PMs should be shipping heavy database chain migrations or any big project, but contained UI projects, especially if you just build it, create the PR and send it to a dev to do the final finishes. I think that's definitely something that's possible. And I think we're going to see that a lot in the next coming years. I think basically everyone's going to become a builder, so it should be really interesting. [00:52:25] S0: Okay. So your advice here is as a PM, maybe don't go right to Cursor, start building, shipping, trying to ship features to production, especially complicated features. Do you think we'll get there? Do you think in a couple years, PMs will be doing this and it'll feel less scary and crazy?
00:52:25 · Lenny Rachitsky, Zevi Arnovitz
[00:52:25] S0: Okay. So your advice here is as a PM, maybe don't go right to Cursor, start building, shipping, trying to ship features to production, especially complicated features. Do you think we'll get there? Do you think in a couple years, PMs will be doing this and it'll feel less scary and crazy? [00:52:42] S1: If there are PMs. Yeah, I think titles are going to collapse and responsibilities are going to collapse and everyone's just going to be building. I definitely think that the models, the context window is getting bigger, the models are getting smarter and I definitely see how PMs or any other background can be writing. At the moment, I wouldn't wait for that. I would use this as a collaborative learning opportunity to work with your dev team. It's going to be difficult. A lot of developers are very, very skeptic about the current state, and I think that it's going to be a lot of sales work on your end to convince, but if you're able to convince, and I think teams that are really sold on this and want to take the time to work on their workflow about how can our team become more AI native, I think that these teams are going to probably be a few years in the future and they're going to look back at the few weeks they spent setting this up as the best time they spent.