Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:17:27 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:17:27] S0: Yeah, I was an engineer for many years. I was then a VC very briefly before joining Anthropic, and actually almost all the PMs on our team have either been engineers or ship code here on Claude Code, and so that's one of the things that I think helps build trust with the team and also just enables us to move a lot faster. And then actually our designers also have been front end engineers before. [00:17:54] S1: Wow. Because that's the big question, there's definitely this emerging that's happening, the Venn diagrams are combining. I think the big question for a lot of people is if you're coming from engineering or product or design, which of those core skills is going to be most valuable? I could see it Anthropic and on Claude Code, engineering is very valuable. I'm curious if other companies, if you have a design background becoming a PM is more valuable or just a PM-PM.
00:18:16 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:18:16] S0: I still think it comes back to product taste. As code becomes much cheaper to write, the thing that becomes more valuable is deciding what to write. What is the right UX for this feature? What is the most delightful way that a user can experience it? We get tens of thousands of GitHub issues asking for every single thing under the sun, and it takes a lot of care and taste to figure out, okay, which of these is worth building and what is the right way to build it? And I think that skillset can come from any background, but I think that's the most important thing. I think the reason why an engineering background is particularly useful, at least for the next few months, is if you have an engineering background, you have a better sense for how hard something should be, and that's often a factor in what you choose to build. So if something is very easy to build, then maybe instead of debating it, you just spend an hour doing it, but if something is harder to build and you know that upfront, then you know that, okay, this will just cost a lot more for our team to get this out the door. So it helps a bit with the prioritization. [00:19:27] S1: You said for the next few months, is that just because the models will get so good potentially in the next few months, you may not even need to know that as much? [00:19:37] S0: I think the valued skillsets does change quite frequently, and so it's really hard to predict more than a few months out. So it's less a commentary on what shift I think will happen and more of a commentary that I think large shifts will happen.
00:19:37 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:19:37] S0: I think the valued skillsets does change quite frequently, and so it's really hard to predict more than a few months out. So it's less a commentary on what shift I think will happen and more of a commentary that I think large shifts will happen. [00:19:53] S1: So you're not saying that's when Mythos comes out and will change everything and that we don't need to know anything about engineering? [00:19:59] S0: No, I'm just saying that every few months it seems like there's a large increase in coding capability, which then changes what other roles are valuable. I think the most important thing is to be able to have this first principles thinking where you can figure out how the tech landscape is changing, what the team really needs from you, and to jump in and fix that hole because I think the work is becoming more amorphous, which means that a great PM is able to understand what all the gaps are to figure out what the highest priority ones are, and then to just figure out, okay, how do I learn that skillset or what is the skillset that I have that I can apply to this challenge? So I think the current environment values people who are able to wear a lot of hats, are able to swap them, and are very low ego about what work they do to help the team move faster.
00:21:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:21:06] S1: I love this answer. There's this question I've been asking people in your shoes, folks that are kind of at the bleeding edge of what AI is capable of and building with the latest tools, which is just where will human brains continue to be useful and necessary for a while until we get to super intelligence. What I'm hearing here is essentially picking the things to work on, knowing where the market's going and figuring out what to prioritize essentially, and then it's knowing if the thing you've built is good and right and getting it out there in some early version at least. Does that sound right? Is there anything else of just where human brains will continue to be useful for at least the next few months? [00:21:43] S0: I think humans still provide a level of common sense that the models don't, and there's a thousand moving pieces to any product launch, some of them are very small, but there's always a lot that could potentially go wrong. I think the model doesn't always have a great sense of who all the stakeholders are, how they relate to each other, what their preferences are, what are the right venues to communicate with them, to keep them on board. I think a lot of this more tacit common sense EQ kind of knowledge is still very valuable. Of course, we want the models to get better at this and I think they will be, but right now I think there's still gaps.
00:21:43 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:21:43] S0: I think humans still provide a level of common sense that the models don't, and there's a thousand moving pieces to any product launch, some of them are very small, but there's always a lot that could potentially go wrong. I think the model doesn't always have a great sense of who all the stakeholders are, how they relate to each other, what their preferences are, what are the right venues to communicate with them, to keep them on board. I think a lot of this more tacit common sense EQ kind of knowledge is still very valuable. Of course, we want the models to get better at this and I think they will be, but right now I think there's still gaps. [00:22:27] S1: How do you just deal as a human going through so much constant change, just being on the inside of the tornado, maybe it's calm there, but just like how do you stay on top of what's going on? How do you stay sane through all this craziness that we're moving through? [00:22:39] S0: I think our team is still people who lean into the chaos. So we try to face every challenge with a smile because there's always so much going on. There's always so many risks and tricky situations that if you get too stressed about anything, you'll burn out, and so we really look for people who can kind of look at a challenge, be like, "Whew, that's going to be hard, but I'm excited to tackle it and I'm going to do the best that I possibly can. And I know I won't be perfect, but I'll be able to sleep at night knowing that I did my best."
00:22:39 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:22:39] S0: I think our team is still people who lean into the chaos. So we try to face every challenge with a smile because there's always so much going on. There's always so many risks and tricky situations that if you get too stressed about anything, you'll burn out, and so we really look for people who can kind of look at a challenge, be like, "Whew, that's going to be hard, but I'm excited to tackle it and I'm going to do the best that I possibly can. And I know I won't be perfect, but I'll be able to sleep at night knowing that I did my best." [00:23:12] S1: That's an interesting answer to just what skills will be important in this future because it's... I forget who said this, maybe Ben Mann, that this is the most normal the world will ever be.