Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:23:23 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:23:23] S1: So coming back to this idea that, as you said, we've evolved from, we used to write all our code, to now we're approaching all code will be written by AI. And it feels like now the transition is it's not just written by AI, but it's one-shotted by AI. Coding now is steering AI, and it's like how often you have to correct it is coding now. So it's like the software development lifecycle slowly being eaten by AI. It'll start helping us come up with ideas, I imagine, more and more. The question I like to ask people is, where do you think human brains will continue to be most valuable as AI continues to eat more and more of that product development lifecycle?
00:24:05 · Adam Mosseri
[00:24:05] S0: Taste, like we talked about. Judgment, particularly around strategy. You might get feedback from an AI on a strategy, but you're not asking an AI to come up with a strategy anytime soon. Or if you are, then it's within the context of bounds you set. So here's my goal, here's my vision, here are my constraints, here's my job, here's my budget. I think that it looks more like management. You are trying to define what success looks like, decide how prescriptive you want to be about the path to success, and then giving feedback along the way. And that is its own craft. And it'll be interesting to see how if some of the same dynamics come up. I believe that if you are too prescriptive, as a leader with a team, you end up stifling good ideas. But if you're too open-ended, sometimes teams just waste time going in the wrong direction. And so that level of autonomy you give a team, maybe that applies to agents in the future, particularly when we're talking not just about building something, but deciding what you build in the first place. But I think of vision as an articulation of the world or the state of the product you want to get to. And I think of strategy as an opinionated path to achieve that vision. Strategy can't be like be the best or be amazing. It has to be controversial, that you have to be ... A reasonable person should be able to disagree with it, because otherwise you're probably just trying to compete on raw execution. And I think both vision and strategy I think are going to be where our brains are spreading more and more of our cycles, and I think less on execution.
00:25:56 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:25:56] S1: Something I have always though is AI should be incredibly good at strategy because you would think, here's the market, here's all the information on the market, our competitors, our metrics, our numbers, our growth, all these things. Help me figure out how to win. You think AI, knowing all that, would be really good at this.
00:26:15 · Adam Mosseri
[00:26:15] S0: I think it could be. I have found it's not unless you steer it pretty aggressively. And I don't mean towards an answer, I mean based on the constraints. It turns out when you're trying to come up with a strategy, there's a lot of things to consider. You need to consider the state of the technology, personnel on the team and what's motivating them and what you can get. Sometimes coming up with an idea that is on the bubble, you know it's going to actually attract some of the best talent. And so the push then goes to the idea. Obviously, the competitive landscape, the regulatory landscape for companies as large as ours and the compliance landscape, the identity and reason to exist for the brand, you have to consider all of these things. I think if you ask an AI just for a strategy lazily, you're not going to get something great. You're going to get something pretty predictable that probably the competition would expect you to do. I think if you want a really more effective one, you need to think long and hard about what are all of the different inputs that need to be considered, make sure you steer the AI in a way that it's considering those as well. And then it needs to be a conversation in the back and forth. But I think if you're willing to put in the work and the time, it can definitely be helpful and definitely be clarifying, particularly if you tell it to be critical. Different models have very different vibes, though, on how willing they are to be pushed back, so I recommend picking one that likes pushing back.
00:27:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:27:44] S1: Yeah. Mythos has gotten really good at being like, "I can't do this. Let's move on." There's all these limitations. [00:27:50] S0: Claude has always been a little bit of a jerk in a way that I actually appreciate. I appreciate it, I really do, because I don't want one that's just like, "Oh, you're so right. I'm so sorry I said that." It's like, no, no, hold on. I want the real intelligence. I don't want the pleaser. [00:28:08] S1: This point you made about people being excited about the strategy is such an interesting one. There's this idea that I read, I think Cory Doctorow wrote this. There's this kind of concept of a centaur and a reverse centaur. So centaur is a human body horse ... This is going somewhere, I promise. Human body horse ... Sorry, human upper part, horse, lower part. [00:28:28] S0: Horse body. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:28:29] S1: Horse body, where the human is in charge. And we prefer that we want to be in charge. Reverse centaur, which is what we want to avoid with AI, is where the AI is controlling us, and we're just doing its bidding. [00:28:40] S0: So it's a horse head on a human body. [00:28:42] S1: Yeah, exactly. [00:28:43] S0: It's terrifying. [00:28:44] S1: So in a sense, Uber drivers and DoorDash people, this is their life, which is not great. And this is the danger, I think, for a lot of people is if it's giving us the strategy and telling us, "Here's what we're building" No one's going to want to do that. So that's a really interesting counterpoint to, we don't want AI to be telling us the strategy, almost.
00:29:02 · Adam Mosseri
[00:29:02] S0: Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of things to be careful about right now. And I would certainly not just assume that because you might be able to outsource some workflow to AI, that you should. There are certain ones where I think it's really just a win-win and there are certain ones where I think the risk outweighs the benefits. Yeah. I mean, you do sometimes find amazing product leaders who are just idea machines, just prolific idea machines. But I do think a lot of the best have taste, have something about them that really makes really strong talent want to work with them, but end up sort of being curators, curators of people, curators of ideas, curators of technologies, curators of strategies. Because I don't really care if I'm hiring a strong lead for an area, if the strategy comes from them or comes from somebody else. I just care that there is an amazing strategy, and everyone has bought into it, and that we're executing against that strategy well. And so I think that some of the best product leaders, yes, have ideas, it's hard to be a great curator if you don't have some of your own ideas, but embrace the reality that they can't come up with everything themselves, and so they need to create an environment in which great ideas bubble up and are chosen or decided upon. And so I think it's not just about curating ideas, but it's sometimes about curating teams and people.