Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:23:12 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[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. [00:23:23] S0: Yeah, it definitely gets harder. I feel like there are a lot of weeks where maybe Sunday night there's some P0 and then by Monday there's a P00 and by Monday afternoon there's a P000 and you're like, "Wow. I can't believe I was so worried about that P0 from Sunday." But I think you just have to acknowledge that there's only so much that you can do that you need to sleep well so that you can make good decisions next day and just brutally prioritize where you spend your time, what's the most important thing to get right and be okay letting things go. There's products that we ship that aren't as polished as I wish they were, but our top goal is to help empower professional developers, and if a product isn't successful, as long as it's not blocking the core use case, it's okay because we'll hear the feedback and we'll fix it in the next release. Launching a feature that is buggy is the kind of thing that would have kept me up at night, but it is something that I'm now able to live with knowing that, okay, we're going to get that quick feedback and we're going to fix it in the next release.
00:24:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:24:31] S1: What I'm imagining is there's that GIF. I think it's maybe from Pirates of the Caribbean where it's this guy walking down a pair of stairs on a ship and the whole ship is just being demolished around him and he's so chill, just strolling down the staircases as everything's falling apart. And that's interesting because everyone I've met from Anthropic is just so chill and just so optimistic. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting insight is just like having this calmness and optimism versus just like, "Oh my God, everything's crazy and going nuts." [00:25:00] S0: Yeah, I think if you don't have it, you'll get pretty burnt out. I think we also tend to hire people who have been in the industry for a while and have experienced lots of ups and downs and have a good sense for what gives them energy and how to maintain their energy over time, and I think that's helped us a lot. [00:25:20] S1: So interesting. Something that I wanted to ask about is, so there's these roles blurring, engineers are becoming PMs, everyone's dogs are cats, everyone's everyone. What do we lose in that world? Do we lose career ladders and clear career paths? Do we lose design consistency, code quality? There's probably some downsides. What are some things you find are just like, okay, that's something we're sacrificing for the greater good?