Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:02:33 · Adam Mosseri
[00:02:33] S0: It's changed a lot this year. So for the longest time at a big company like ours, the canonical team was something like two or three Android engineers, two or three iOS engineers, two or three server engineers, maybe a generalist, a PM, a designer, a data scientist, a researcher, if you were lucky, and maybe that's about it. So on the order of a Baker's dozen. And that is a function of you want to have, for anybody who's running code, someone who can review their code and who's familiar with that code base, and having these different functions that are more specialized. I think it's very different at a startup. But this year, it's changing. We've adopted what we call pods, which are just mini teams, where it's, call it, four to six engineers who are a bit more generalists. One, we call product staff, which is sort of an evolution of the PM, so a PM who can do some of what a designer does, and some of what a data scientist does, and some of what a research does, leveraging the latest tools that we have for them. And then whatever specialist they need. If they're doing something that requires a pricing strategy, you need a senior data scientist. If you're doing something that is really novel from an experience standpoint, you need a very senior product designer. So we try to build a team based on the needs of the work a bit, but then end up with a much smaller core, which is more on the order of six or seven usually. And that is a very big shift that's just happening to us this year. But just by virtue of having less people to coordinate, they can often move faster and make better decisions, a little bit less designed by committee. So we talk a lot about AI adjusting and improving productivity, and that's part of it. But I think another part of it is just the small teams, I think, often are just more effective. You just have less specialists, right? So you might not have any. You might be four engineers and a product staff, and there's no data scientist, there's no designer, there's no researcher, there's no content designer. The product staff is the generalist that supports all of those things. I mean, what's clearly happening is all of the functions are starting to bleed into each other, and the whole industry's wrestling with what that means. A lot of what a data scientist does at a big company, for instance, is relatively mechanical.
00:06:00 · Adam Mosseri, Lenny Rachitsky
And so there's stuff that they do that is really more like art and science and there's stuff that's really more like just pulling data, data management. So some of the tools that we're building internally to understand ... For instance, a traditional data science question would be a waterfall. So if you wanted to look at people creating reels, you would look at all the steps and then how people fall off on each step, and try to figure out where there might be opportunities to improve things. That kind of basic waterfall analysis is much easier now to use some of our internal tools to just pull automatically, as opposed to having to have a data scientist do a bunch of bespoke work for that. So our product staff might be able to do that now, and they couldn't do that a year ago. So you just end up with these people who have more generalist shapes. And then when you need it, when you really need it, you have a more senior, ideally, or just more creative specialist. So a phenomenal product designer or just a genius data scientist or researcher. [00:07:32] S1: This is so interesting. It's exactly what I just heard. I had Fiona Fung, the head of engineering for Claude Code and co-work on the podcast. She's Boris Cherny's manager, and she described the people she hires now are, one, builders with great taste that can take an idea from end-to-end, and people with deep expertise in a very specific domain. [00:07:53] S0: The taste thing matters a lot. I really agree with that. Boris used to work at Instagram. [00:07:58] S1: Oh, that's right.
00:07:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:07:58] S1: Oh, that's right. [00:07:59] S0: Yeah, he was a senior IC at Instagram for a while. I love seeing him. He's all over Threads now. It's like he's sort of like the face of Claude Code, which is amazing. Yeah, he's crushing it. [00:08:05] S1: He's killing it. He's a celebrity now. [00:08:08] S0: He really is. He's his own little ... Yeah, for sure. In a world that is on fire right now. No, I think taste matters a ton. So in a world where it's easier to build things, it's more important to make sure that your time is spent figuring out what you should be building in the first place. Actually, so a lot of designers right now are very anxious about their roles. You know, I've got these other generalists doing design, you've got engineers doing design, product staff doing design. But I'm actually pretty long on design or designers because they tend to have taste. And I think that is something that is much more difficult to imagine being automated away. And so there's other challenges with design sometimes, but I'm pretty long right now on designers. [00:08:59] S1: I've always felt that too. As it is so easy to build and all the work that AI produces is so ... You can tell this was Claude designed. I know what you did here. This is Codex. [00:09:10] S0: Well, they all have their vibe. When you vibe code your apps, we call it vibe coding, and you're all like, "Oh, that's a Codex app," or, "Oh, that's a Claude app."
00:09:10 · Adam Mosseri, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:09:10] S0: Well, they all have their vibe. When you vibe code your apps, we call it vibe coding, and you're all like, "Oh, that's a Codex app," or, "Oh, that's a Claude app." [00:09:17] S1: Right. And that's Replit, that's Lovable. You can predict these things. I've always though that too, that design should be thriving, or, you know, for some reason, it hasn't yet. If you look at jobs for designers, they're kind of flat lining. I feel like the missing piece is like the PME piece of deeply understanding the business, and what will grow it, and what success, you know, all that stuff. The business side of it versus the taste side of it.
00:09:40 · Adam Mosseri
[00:09:40] S0: Yeah. I think you're going to see ... We have a senior designer at Instagram called Nate, who just transferred into product staff. So I think some of what you'll see is it will be harder to talk about design roles and who's a good designer because they're not going to just stay in traditional design roles. If you're an amazing designer, you probably have strong opinions outside of just the interaction and visual design. You probably have strong opinions on product strategy, even on the business, on the go-to-market. And so I actually think some of our strongest product staff are going to be converts from design and from data science who are just looking to expand their reach. And they were influential across functional boundaries before, but this world where those functional boundaries are just wildly blurred, just allow them just to jump in. And so sure, they'll be technically a generalist on paper, but they clearly have a uniquely strong ability in one type of craft. But they've got the ability and strong opinions to make informed decisions across other parts or other crafts. And so I don't know that all the strongest designers I have will all be in design. They probably will be the majority, but I can imagine a bunch of really strong ones moving roles. But, I mean, I should also check my own bias here though, because I started as a designer at Facebook way back when, and I switched roles.
00:11:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:11:05] S1: No, designers are great. I'm a big fan. So this is really interesting. There's always been this GM model where different types of functions can become GMs. It's like this product staff role feels like a similar situation, where different functions can become product staff. [00:11:17] S0: Yeah. Yeah. And that was true of PM before, but it's just so much more true now. And, I mean, in some ways, it's probably the age of the generalist, but I still think there's going to be a real important role for these really amazing specialists who are just ... They're all about going ... I wish I was like that. I always had this, like I romanticize the phenomenal machine learning engineer or AI researcher or shoemaker. I think that's the coolest thing in the world. But it's never been my shape. I've never been great at anything. I've always just had range. That's always been my strength. [00:11:55] S1: Same. Okay. So this idea of product staff. So the idea is on these new pods ... So this is a new thing you guys are doing. So there's these pod teams, product staff, engineers, and maybe one specialist that's going deep on set pricing algorithm or something like that. So what this tells me is there's these adjacent roles that are maybe more in trouble over the years. Data science, for example, user research, for example. You talked about designers being anxious. Is there anything there of just like, "Oh, maybe folks in these groups should think about shifting to other roles."?