Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:59:12 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:59:12] S1: It's so funny. I just had that conversation with the engineer and the team of talking about flow. Remember the old days you have this really gnarly problem and you pop that music soundtrack in, and then you're just in the zone? So yeah, and then there was always that big aha moment at the end I would remember. You remember being like, "You finally cracked it. Yay." So we do, but I think now we get a lot of joy from the product, but I do think because I hear from other engineers as well of well, some of the hardest parts is what I used to enjoy. Yeah, I heard that from another engineer as well, and so I think we're all just kind of shifting, but I do see the thing and that's why I was talking about the pairwise programming and the hackathon, that did recently come up more. Folks were starting to feel like it started to be a lonely experience. [01:00:07] S0: So interesting. Within Anthropic, I'm curious, so engineering the most transformed I think of any role right now, what's the second most transformed role so far would you say within Anthropic that's most different from how was like a couple years ago, let's say?
01:00:07 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[01:00:07] S0: So interesting. Within Anthropic, I'm curious, so engineering the most transformed I think of any role right now, what's the second most transformed role so far would you say within Anthropic that's most different from how was like a couple years ago, let's say? [01:00:23] S1: It's all the coding adjacent roles are shifting. I know you were chatting with Kat, I think PM is also transformed quite a bit because PM are no longer bottlenecked if they have an idea waiting on engineering bandwidth. So that's kind of like the next role that I saw on shift. Actually, our PMs have also helped us roll up sleeves and help shift some features when there was something we wanted to do, and an engineer wasn't able to. So I think it's all the coding adjacent roles are starting to shift, but I think that's where again, the verification is important because when you have more different disciplines checking in, how do we make sure everybody has higher confidence? I also think we need to do more to keep automating these other portions of the workflows. For sure, we focus a lot on coding, but next when you think about design or data science, those are starting to be the next areas that I think are good opportunities for us to see how we can start improving the experiences there as well.
01:01:26 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:01:26] S0: Yeah, speaking of data science, I have a data science friend and he was just saying how data science is so different now where now most of their job is people doing their own not amazing data science work using AI, and then just showing it to the data scientists, "Here, here's the analysis I did. Can you just make sure it's right?" And half the time it's not right, and so the job is just a whole different job now instead of doing the work that they thought they wanted to do. Now it's like, "All right, I'm just reviewing all this AI data science all the time. What the hell?" Along the lines, coming back to just how your team operates and how things are changing, let me see if something comes with this question. What should an engineering manager expect from their team now versus a couple of years ago, what's a normal, I don't know, baseline expectation of how things should work other than just we're shipping faster, is there anything else?
01:02:20 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:02:20] S1: Oh, interesting. Well, definitely I think most commits are Claude assisted, and so that was a shift. I think I kind of mentioned we have Slack channels with all the feedback and also our dashboards that we have gave to Claude. I think having engineers keep building that stronger product sense muscle is I think also another, and I think that in general helps with these really strong-minded product engineers. I would say more of these roles that were traditionally non-engineering, you do now see engineers, and sometimes you're just blocked by waiting for a cross-functional partner. I think there's less of those blocks now just because the models are able to augment additional capabilities that you may not have as an engineer. [01:03:12] S0: So it's kind of interesting. It's both directions. Engineers becoming more product-minded and responsible for the quality and success of a product, and then everybody becoming an engineer more and more. [01:03:23] S1: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's all blurring. [01:03:26] S0: Yeah, I forget who said this, but there's this like, " What is a role anymore?" And this guy said that it's like, "What's the average of what you do? What's the highest percentage of what you do, and that's kind of your role now," whatever it is to be. [01:03:40] S1: Yeah.
01:03:40 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:40] S1: Yeah. [01:03:41] S0: Oh, man. I want to come back to your point about obsession with the product. Living, breathing, the product, dogfooding. I talked to a bunch of people that work with you about you, and that's the thing that came up most, just your obsession with living and breathing the product, using the product constantly, whatever it is you're building, this idea of dogfooding. Talk about just why that is so important, why that's something you instill within your teams and reports.
01:04:06 · Fiona Fung
[01:04:06] S1: Oh, love it. Yeah, I think it's really and this has worked for me. It's just been a really good way for me to keep a pulse. Anytime you build product, there's a dream. You're really hoping to enable an experience or making an experience better. So I think that helps me keep really close to the pulse. I also think, and maybe for sure on Visual Studio, that was where I got this love of it, but it's interesting because even Marketplace, I remembered once in a while, even after I left the team actually, one time I had a MacBook Air I wanted to sell. I'm like, "Oh, I haven't sold anything on Marketplace." And I could not believe it the minute I put it up for sale, a seller or buyer tried to scam me, and it was an interesting new scam vector I didn't detect, but that goes to, again, people will use your products in ways that you may not expect. And so especially as leaders or even anyone on the team, we all have different life, actually, it's funny when I was supporting the VR and AR teams, somehow how I used VR, the setup, I would always be able to find these really weird floor height issues. So that ended up being a, "Oh, I'm going to help us," because somehow I got a good repro environment, and so I think it's number one, that's how you keep your pulse on the product that you're building and don't get too lost in metrics and dashboards only, or presentations.