Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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."?
00:12:27 · Adam Mosseri, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:12:27] S0: I mean, there's anxiety everywhere. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people at a lot of other companies, and it just seems like this is a lot of concern right now about competition, about job displacement, about unintended or unforeseen consequences of all this technology and all this moving so quickly. So that's definitely happening. I think that you will see the functional lines continue to blur, but I still think there will be room for functions. They'll just be shaped differently. They won't all be senior ICs necessarily, but they'll all be either senior or on their way to being senior. You can't just have a bunch of super senior data scientists and no new ones, because then who's going to be the new super senior data scientists in the future? So you need to basically hire and mentor and grow talent. Maybe the team is smaller overall, and then that those who aren't on their way to being super senior move into more of a generalist role. I think that's a reasonable soft landing. But I do think you're going to want to make sure you're investing not only in today's senior talent for each specific function, but in tomorrow's. Otherwise, I think you're going to regret it in a couple years is my take. That said, who knows what the world looks like in a couple of years? So my big thing is generally don't be overly confident in whatever your predictions are, because there's just too much flux right now. [00:13:51] S1: Benedict Evans was on the podcast recently, said the same thing, "We don't want to know anything about what's going on."
00:13:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:13:51] S1: Benedict Evans was on the podcast recently, said the same thing, "We don't want to know anything about what's going on." [00:13:56] S0: Yeah, yeah. I like him a lot. I'll make sure I listen to the pod. [00:14:00] S1: Yeah. So you talked about taste. This makes me think about ... So you're interviewing a lot of people, hiring a lot of people. What are some traits that are trending up in things that you look for more and more now in this world? And what are some traits that are trending down, and maybe less important to you?
00:14:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Mosseri
[00:14:00] S1: Yeah. So you talked about taste. This makes me think about ... So you're interviewing a lot of people, hiring a lot of people. What are some traits that are trending up in things that you look for more and more now in this world? And what are some traits that are trending down, and maybe less important to you? [00:14:17] S0: I mean, there are some things that are the same. So for the longest time, almost no matter what the function, I always look for three things. Do you have sort of grit? You've got some drive, some fire in your belly. Are you a quick learner? And are you reasonably ideally very self-aware so that you can actually take feedback and know what you're good at and know you're not good? Because if you are those things, if you got fire in your belly, you learn quickly and you're self-aware, you can kind of get good at anything eventually. But if any of those things are missing, there's usually an issue, so that's the baseline. Right now for hiring, but just for I think people who are going to be more successful over these next 5 or 10 years, as things change so significantly, I think two things that I'm continuing to encourage myself to do, are to stay curious and to put yourself out there. I just think you got to try things. To that point before where no one really knows what's going on, you have to be willing to try things. I don't know, do you speak another language? [00:15:25] S1: Russian, yeah.