Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:25:42 · Cat Wu
[00:25:42] S0: We're sacrificing product consistency. Historically, when code was expensive to write, you would carefully plan out everything in your product suite, how every product relates to each other, what the use case for every single one is, how they integrate, and you would pretty much have one product for each use case, and now with AI moving so quickly and with so many ideas that we need to test out, we do sometimes have features that overlap with each other. A lot of the times it's because there's two form factors that we love internally and we want the external audience to tell us which one is better. What that means for someone who's a new user though is a new user might not know, okay, what is the best path to accomplish X? There is more education we need to do to help people understand what the core features are and what the best practices are for using them. I think this is the cost of launching a lot of features. I think users also feel like it's hard to keep up with the latest. Usually in traditional PM, you ship a feature every month or quarter, and so it's really easy for a user to understand, okay, I just need to check in on this once a month and I'll learn some new things, and if I ignore it for six months, it's fine, I don't feel like I'm missing out. I think with these agentic tools, not just Claude Code and Cowork, but across the whole ecosystem, people feel this need to check Twitter every single day to see what the absolute latest thing is, and I think there's more we can do to help people feel less like they're on this ever increasingly fast treadmill and that they feel like... I would love people to feel like they can just open these tools, the tools will educate them or teach them what they want to know, and that they can just feel more bought along.