Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:53:43 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:53:43] S0: Let me ask you another question around just the job of a PM. One of the biggest fears people have with these AI tools for PMs for every function I imagine is just you start to rely on these things, your skills start to atrophy, you're producing all this slop that looks great, cool, amazing strategy doc. No, it's actually not at all good. Are these Linear tickets or just products that are half-baked? What's your take on these two parts of just like, how has this impacted your craft as a PM? Do you feel like this is weakening your skills because you're so reliant on these tools and just how do you keep the quality of this stuff up and not just like, "Eh, it's just a bunch of AI generated slop."
00:54:25 · Zevi Arnovitz
[00:54:25] S1: I have a very strong disagree to this and I've heard it a bunch. I remember when I started using Tal Raviv has this whole course on building a PM Copilot using projects, which is probably one of the best courses that you can take. And when I started working with my own Copilot, I remember people at work looking and saying like, "Oh, so you're basically outsourcing your thinking." And to me, that's just the worst way to look at it. And I think for some reason, these people usually have a high correlation with the kind of person who doesn't like to show their presentation when it's only 10% done or doesn't want to ask for help a lot. I think that there's a misconception with a lot of PMs that the job is always having the right answers and being the smartest person in the room. And at least how I was trained and how I believe the role of the PM is, it's the exact opposite. It's basically harnessing anything that can get us as quick as possible to delivering the right solution to users. And I just think this is like that really smart person that has context or your mentor or whatever, but is just always available and doesn't judge you and can really help you. So if you're using it to just create your outputs and then putting them out there, yeah, that's AI slot, but it's also human error. I think it's really important that you own your own outputs. If you put anything out there or show something in a product review and you say, "Oh, sorry, that was built by AI." That's your mistake. I think if you use these intentionally and really take the time to understand how to use AI in the correct way, it's one of the biggest game changers that will make you much better as a PM. And another thing here is that, especially for more junior PMs, it allows you to play at such a higher level than you would normally. I think that at Wix, I wasn't thinking of what's the marketing strategy of the company and how will the onboarding be completely revamped within the whole product. But on my side product, I can just do whatever decisions I want and think of the strategy and marketing and the messaging. And this is basically just getting me reps, which is one of the most important things at the beginning of your career.
00:56:47 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
So I understand the fear that how do you outsource certain stuff and you're not owning 100% of everything, but I think the upside is so much more valuable. And I think the only way that AI makes you worse at your job is if you're using it wrong. [00:57:03] S0: Is there anything that you've learned about reducing the sloppiness of the output, just like a tip for keeping the quality high of the stuff that it produces? [00:57:13] S1: Similar to people, setting up AI for success, for the task at hand. So if I just brought in a junior to write a deck or something and I didn't give it any guideline, I just said, "Give a strategy deck." He would probably just go online and find top strategy deck and just reproduce that, which is basically what AI is doing. It's basically just fed all of the internet. So instead of that, guiding it and giving it context on what your style of writing is and what you're trying to solve and all these different things, I think that's probably one of the biggest unlocks. So that's just a quick tip. And also Cursor has a /command called deslop, which is basically going back over the code. I don't know if this is integrated into the product yet, but it's on Twitter. Their founders have been talking about this, so that's definitely something I would run after just to make sure that no slop is left behind.
00:57:13 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:57:13] S1: Similar to people, setting up AI for success, for the task at hand. So if I just brought in a junior to write a deck or something and I didn't give it any guideline, I just said, "Give a strategy deck." He would probably just go online and find top strategy deck and just reproduce that, which is basically what AI is doing. It's basically just fed all of the internet. So instead of that, guiding it and giving it context on what your style of writing is and what you're trying to solve and all these different things, I think that's probably one of the biggest unlocks. So that's just a quick tip. And also Cursor has a /command called deslop, which is basically going back over the code. I don't know if this is integrated into the product yet, but it's on Twitter. Their founders have been talking about this, so that's definitely something I would run after just to make sure that no slop is left behind. [00:58:12] S0: That is so funny, deslop. Okay. One more question, which may lead to something else, but kind of going in a whole different direction. You used AI to help you actually interview for the job that you got at Meta. Talk about how you did that, because a lot of people right now are struggling to find a job reading about all these people using AI to help them interview. You actually did it. What did you use? What worked?