Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:41 · Lazar Jovanovic, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:00:41] S0: I like to use the Aladdin and the Genie analogy. You rub the lamp, a genie comes out, "I'll grant you three wishes." The first wish is, "I want to be taller." Genie makes me 13 feet tall because I was not specific. AI just don't understand what do you mean when you say, "You know what I mean?" So you need to be specific. I'm optimizing 100% of my time today on good judgment, clarity, quality, taste. [00:01:08] S1: Today, my guest is Lazar Jovanovic. Lazar is a professional vibe coder. He gets paid to vibe code all day and build internal and external products. This conversation is going to blow your mind in so many ways. This is not only a really interesting new career path for people to consider. If you listen to what Lazar shares, it's also a really important glimpse into where things are heading for tech roles. I found myself thinking more deeply about the future of product management and engineering and design during this chat than I have in a long time. We also spent a bunch of time on Lazar's best advice as an elite vibe coder for getting the most out of AI tools. He's got a bunch of really interesting and useful frameworks that I've not heard anyone else share that will immediately level up your success using all the latest AI tools. Lazar, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. [00:05:00] S0: Thanks for having me, man.
00:05:00 · Lazar Jovanovic, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:05:00] S0: Thanks for having me, man. [00:05:01] S1: Okay, so I had Elena Verna on the podcast. She's head of growth at Lovable. She mentioned that she works with a professional vibe coder, you. I had so many questions. I almost wanted to go on a tangent with her to try to understand this role. Instead, I asked you to come on the podcast. There's so much I want to talk about. I want to talk about just this career path and just how you got into it, how other people might get into it, where you think this is all going, this whole vibe coding thing. Also, I want to get into what you've learned about it being successful using all these AI tools because this is your job. First, I want to just start with understanding this actual job. What is it that you do day to day? You're basically being paid a full-time job to vibe code. Incredible. What are you responsible for? What are you doing day to day?
00:05:47 · Lazar Jovanovic, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:05:47] S0: Well, as you said it, it's a dream job. I get paid to do what I would've done anyways. It's the best job in the world. I get to use tools like Lovable every day to push projects to production, whether for internal or external use. Those could be ranging anything from different templates on marketing side, sales side or whatever, or they can be as deep as building some internal tools with a lot of integrations and connections and whatnot. So the surface area that I cover is pretty wide across all departments because it's such a flexible role and it compliments so many things. It's an ideas role. A lot of people have a lot of great ideas, but they don't know how to build them or they just don't have the bandwidth to. And that's where I step in today to make sure that these ideas come to life fast and with quality and security that they should have in order to be available for users in production. [00:06:43] S1: And one thing that's really interesting here is it's both internal and external tools. A lot of companies have someone building a bunch of internal tools using AI. You ship stuff that's actually public and it's sort of a product, Lovable products.
00:06:43 · Lenny Rachitsky, Lazar Jovanovic
[00:06:43] S1: And one thing that's really interesting here is it's both internal and external tools. A lot of companies have someone building a bunch of internal tools using AI. You ship stuff that's actually public and it's sort of a product, Lovable products. [00:06:55] S0: Yeah, definitely. Some of the stuff that I've shipped that are public are like when we launched our Shopify integration, most of, if not all, the templates that users were remixing were built by me. So stuff like that. Or the merch store, because we wanted to obviously prove the concept that, "Hey, Lovable and Shopify just works. It's so simple, anybody can do it." I vibe coded our merch store. So all the merch, including this shirt that people were buying online, they would've bought it from a store that was built by me. But then again, on the internal side, we want to track a lot of things. One of the cool things that we want to build now, for example, is feature adoption metrics. If we build a feature, how many people are actually using it and adopting it? And that's a pretty custom build. We have a very custom stack. We're building custom features. There's nothing out there that I could just pick off the shelf and build or adopt faster than I would've built it myself. At this point, I'm at a stage where if it takes me an hour or two hours to set up a big enterprise account somewhere, I'm just going to build it myself faster. So I'm in that position of build versus buy. I'm in the build boat, so to speak. Yeah.
00:06:55 · Lazar Jovanovic, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:06:55] S0: Yeah, definitely. Some of the stuff that I've shipped that are public are like when we launched our Shopify integration, most of, if not all, the templates that users were remixing were built by me. So stuff like that. Or the merch store, because we wanted to obviously prove the concept that, "Hey, Lovable and Shopify just works. It's so simple, anybody can do it." I vibe coded our merch store. So all the merch, including this shirt that people were buying online, they would've bought it from a store that was built by me. But then again, on the internal side, we want to track a lot of things. One of the cool things that we want to build now, for example, is feature adoption metrics. If we build a feature, how many people are actually using it and adopting it? And that's a pretty custom build. We have a very custom stack. We're building custom features. There's nothing out there that I could just pick off the shelf and build or adopt faster than I would've built it myself. At this point, I'm at a stage where if it takes me an hour or two hours to set up a big enterprise account somewhere, I'm just going to build it myself faster. So I'm in that position of build versus buy. I'm in the build boat, so to speak. Yeah. [00:08:10] S1: And then who do you report to? Are you this rover that helps wherever, or are you with a specific team?
00:08:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Lazar Jovanovic
[00:08:10] S1: And then who do you report to? Are you this rover that helps wherever, or are you with a specific team? [00:08:15] S0: I'd say probably closer to the former. I started in growth. Elena brought me on early on because she has so many great ideas and she just needed somebody with the right type of mindset and velocity and ownership to just take them away, build them up, get them into production, whether they're based on education or anything, go-to-market or whatever. But then obviously when you're able to ship fast, everybody needs that in an environment that we as a company are now living in, which is we're the fastest growing startup in history. So every department needs a Lazar now or yesterday. So now I'm shifting a little bit into some of the go-to-market roles and even building some, again, internal tools for enterprise team. I'm working on some community tools as well right now as we speak. So I'm a little bit all over the place, but I thrive in that environment where I'm given a rough concept, a rough idea, and I'm just tasked to bring it to life as soon as possible.