Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:58:37 · Zevi Arnovitz
[00:58:37] S1: I feel like the analogy here is I have 12 nieces and nephews and you can see how people who have grown up in a different world, how their mind is formed differently. So if you ask me, how do you answer a phone, I'll do this. But a child now, when you say, "How do you answer the phone?" They'll do this. They'll do the iPhone answer. And I feel like people who are growing up now in their professional lives were the same just with AI. So every time I'm faced with a new challenge or problem, I think AI first how to solve it. So Meta reached out and said they'd like me to interview. Straight away, I opened up a project within Claude. I started looking online for all the best information out there, things that I resonated with. I took a ton of frameworks and stuff from Ben Erez who has written a guest post for you, who I think is one of the best minds out there right now. And basically I created a project which was my coach, which I would come and consult what to do at each phase. I would mock interview with, and this was amazing. Also, I created a game in Base44, which helped me ... I was really struggling with segmentation within the product questions, so thinking of the correct segments. So I basically just created a quiz game, which creates questions and different segmentations and I have to choose. So this was like, I spun this up. It's a web app that I would play sometimes when I was on the bus to work. So basically, I think Ben talks about this a bunch, so I don't just go read Ben's stuff, but just creating a project and feeding it with all the best information on the internet and then mocking a bunch. I will say that the biggest game changer for me was doing human mocks. So cold outreaching to people on LinkedIn and having them do actual mocks for me, I think that at the end of the day, especially for the Meta PM prep, which is super competitive and difficult, I think there's no way to get around that.
01:00:38 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:00:38] S0: That is so cool they use that post. I wasn't aware. We're going to link to it. And in that post, Ben shares all these prompts you can feed ChatGPT to help you prepare for interviews, do mocks online. It's a really important point to say that those take you to a point, but it's actually better to use humans. I actually have a post coming out soon in collaboration with Noam Segal about how everyone is using AI to interview. And one of the most interesting ways I've heard people and that we've found in this research was that people use it to get feedback. They record the interview and then it gives them feedback. Here's where you could have done better. Here's what you missed because the feedback loop is so missing. No one ever tells you, here's what you did badly in this interview. No one tells you that, and AI can do that.
01:01:21 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:01:21] S1: So I'll add two things to that. One, which is exactly this. So I'll mock with AI. Also, I did something really cool where there's a question bank online free by Louis Lynn, which basically is an always updating bank of questions that people are asked in real interviews. And I basically used Comet, which is the Perplexity's browser. And I had the agent run all kinds of analyses on what the most asked questions are. And that's how I knew how to prioritize what questions I would mock. And then at the end of these mocks, I would tell Claude within the project, "You're my coach and I don't want you to make me feel good. I want you to make me as ready as possible for these interviews. So give me feedback, like you said." And the other thing that I did was really cool was some questions where I didn't have time to mock. I would ask Claude to play the candidate, and then it would just give me a really good answer. And I could also learn from that, like learning from someone who does a perfect answer. [01:02:20] S0: Oh, man. I really love the way you phrased it, that people kind of in your generation, the default is, "I have something I need to do. Let's go to AI immediately and help me prepare for this thing, help me figure it out." [01:02:32] S1: Yeah. [01:02:33] S0: And this comes back to this quote that I always think about, which I think everyone is always hearing, but it's such an important quote that it's not that you will be replaced by AI at least for a long time. It's you'll be replaced by someone who's better at using AI than you. [01:02:47] S1: I agree.
01:02:47 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:02:47] S1: I agree. [01:02:48] S0: And that's what these conversations are for to help people keep up with all that and to learn some of these skills. And again, see where the future is going and start to learn how to get there yourself. Okay. Zevi, before we get to our very exciting lightning round, I'm going to take us to a recurring segment on this podcast I call Failure Corner. And why I love this segment is people come on this, just even this conversation, it's like all these amazing things you figured out, everything is going so well. People rarely hear the things that don't go well, and those are often the most interesting and impactful stories. So the question is just, what's the story of a time you failed in your career and what did you learn from that experience?
01:03:26 · Zevi Arnovitz
[01:03:26] S1: Yeah, I love this. I love this. I love Failure Corner, big fan. So I'll tell a story about when I started at Wix. So basically I started within Wix as a student program and straight out of the student program, you get put into a certain team. So I was in the editor, which is the core product of Wix. And the other PMs were just the best PMs almost at Wix. There's four other people had much more experience than me and they were ridiculously good. And I remember coming in and thinking like, my first product review, I'm going to blow these people's socks off. They're not going to believe how good of a PM I am. And I basically didn't really share what I was thinking. I would work tons of hours alone and I was like, "I'm going to kill this product review. They're going to be so impressed." And I ended up failing miserably. My product review was not good. It wasn't the format they expected. They had a ton of questions that I missed and I felt awful when it was over. I was like, "Ah, you're such an idiot." And I saw that everyone was like, "All right, cool. Yeah, just come back in two weeks and we'll keep getting at this." And I understood in that moment that they had zero expectation of me being a 10X PM, but the expectation of me was being a 10X learner. And the second I understood that, my whole mindset shifted. And I think this is probably the best tip that I give now to junior PMs is basically be the best learner you can be at the beginning. No one expects you to know all the answers and no one expects you to be good. So basically what I did was I took each person on the PM team, there was four other PMs and I assessed what their strength is and used them as a mentor for that. So Neri who's still my mentor till today, he has the best product sense of anyone I've met. Oya is super, she's like a methodology expert. She just thinks in frameworks. Yaara, who is the head of product, basically can look at a product and then instantly understand the third and fourth order effects of them, the system thinking. So every time I had an issue with one of these areas, I would come to one of them and consult them, and this does two things. First of all, I learned a ton. And the second thing is that when the next time, the next product review, my success felt to them like their success because it wasn't this kid who's trying to show us up how cool he is.