Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:46:17 · Lazar Jovanovic
[00:46:17] S0: And implementation plan is kind of in service of the future tasks.md, if that make ... All of these files are in service of building tasks.md. When you build tasks.md, then the rest is almost irrelevant. It's just the basis for you to build tasks to execute. The implementation plan is kind of the first layer, which is again, higher-level overview. It doesn't go into the depth of how to get there. It just goes into the explaining of, "Oh well, if we're building this, I think we should start with the backend, and we should start with tables and then later authentication. And then after that, we're going to bring in the API. And then after that, we're going to do this." It's like, again, just think of it as having ... I'm an ideas guy. I'm sitting with a technical guy. It's me and you. We're building our startup. I know you're a software engineer by background and I'm telling you my idea. I'm giving you the master plan. And you come to me back and you're like, "Okay, if you want to do this, it's doable. Here's how I would order it." You didn't have a roadmap, you didn't open your Linear and started writing features and RFCs and whatever. You're just high-level talking about the order of things. And then me and you, again, as two co-founders, we talk and say, "Okay, well, if we agree on this, how should this look like? How should this feel? Let's describe it high-level," but now because I use AI, I can go a little bit deeper. And that's where I like to see Lovable or any other tool. ChatGPT is good at it. I even have my ... I've built custom GPTs. So if people want to start somewhere before they even get into any tool, they can go to ChatGPT store for GPTs and just type Lovable base prompt generator or Lovable PRD generator and find those that I built and just brain dump in them and then get these files as output. Right? So I like to see some elements of CSS in design guidelines because with design, it's a little bit tricky. AI is sometimes overcreative. So that's where I'm doing a little bit more technical steering. And then finally, it's just the user journeys, just like if we know how things look like, if we know how they feel, if we know what we're building, high-level. High-level, just very high-level again, how do people navigate? What are some of the features in there and stuff like that?
00:48:43 · Lazar Jovanovic
And then tasks.md gets into the nitty-gritty of, "Oh, if you want these user journeys and you want the backend built first, here's a set of tasks that I need to do." It just takes that as an input. I'm just making the tool do that gritty work that humans used to spend so much time on. I feel like with these tools, we're all becoming product managers on steroids. We're just leveraging AI, but good product managers, I think are not compensated for writing good PRDs. They're compensated, again for good judgment. Somebody else can do the writing. You, as somebody who directs and builds this product, you need to know, again, what's going to be useful, what's going to be tasteful, what's going to be something that actually moves the needle. I will say one thing though, just because I put so much emphasis on, "Oh, you need to acquire taste. Oh," that doesn't mean you shouldn't build. You get better at this by building actually. So everybody listening to this should literally go and build something today. One, two, three, four, five projects, test all of these tools because that's how you get to clarity, not just by reading, but also by doing as well.
00:49:57 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:51:48 · Lazar Jovanovic
[00:51:48] S0: Yeah, and don't get me wrong, there's obviously a ton of value in prototyping. There are a lot of people maybe watching this that are like, "Okay, I want to use Lovable at work, but I can't," or whatever. There's different reasons. There's, maybe you're in healthcare or finance or there's something ... There's different reasons. There's maybe you're in healthcare or finance or there's something regulatory that just prevents you from pushing to production. Like, building for the sake of prototyping is one of the best use cases. Our model for 2025 was demo, don't memo, which is like, instead of writing all these documents and talking and sitting on meetings with your engineers, trying to get your vision as a marketer or a sales guy in the office across, go into Lovable and build the prototype in 30 minutes and just hand it over. And I have a real job that I held before Lovable, that's exactly what happened. This time last year, I needed something built enterprise grade really. And Lovable and myself were not there yet to build it at that point, but I had a team of engineers that I worked with. I built the prototype in four hours and they actually were able to replicate it six to seven months later into production with connecting all the pipes and everything. But if I had to describe it, I would say it would take me at least a week or two just to get the words out there. I just sat and built it in four hours. And that's like, Lovable January of last year. This Lovable today, January 2026, is like ages, ages ahead with functionalities. It's so much better. It's not even a contest. Right? So I think now with our stage where like, for instance, there's I'd say at least to best of my knowledge, at least half of S&P 500 companies have people working in them that are using Lovable to some extent. Right? And we have a lot of enterprise companies that are actually on enterprise plans with Lovable that are creating super meaningful projects. I'm not going to name names, but leading rideshare companies of the world, leading telecommunications companies of the world, leading companies of the world in many, many aspects, healthcare, finance are actively with their teams using Lovable. And it's always the same feedback, which is, yes, we may not be able to push to prod, but our marketers are no longer waiting for engineers.
00:54:18 · Lazar Jovanovic, Lenny Rachitsky
Our people in go to-market or sales or HR, or whatever roles are now just confidently building internal stuff for us to manage our expenses or manage employee onboarding or... There's so many use cases like that where you're seeing Lovable and other tools for that matter, being used to push things into production. [00:54:39] S1: To tell people do this workflow that you're describing with all these MD files, do you think you could share after we record this, just templates, simple templates of what these files look like for people just to look at and copy? [00:54:51] S0: I would literally go to ChatGPT, as I said, and brain dump into it in my... Just type, Lovable PRD generator. You'll see my name there and that I'm the author. Go in, brain dump. It will ask you a couple of questions to get clarity and just produce four files for you and you can just go ahead and upload those. [00:55:14] S1: Amazing. Cool. We'll link to that. So it's not just, here's a bunch of files, let's go talk to this thing. It'll generate the right files for you, and then you plug that into Lovable or other tools. [00:55:22] S0: Yeah, it's trained to think like I do. So yeah.
00:55:25 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:55:25] S1: Oh, amazing. Okay. That is perfect. By the way, I want to talk about how you unblock yourself because there's a whole other series of tips you have there, but I just want to reflect on... It's so interesting how, one, you're kind of from first principles, learning how to build product as a PM, as an engineer, as a designer, and you're figuring out a workflow where AI is helping fill in all the gaps that you don't have for as an engineer, as a PM helping you craft PRDs and design. So I think that's so interesting. It's interesting that these functions still work and are necessary. Now it's you and AI help create all this, basically, this triad that's always existed, product manager, engineering and design. And something I've always thought is that there's this question of which background will be most valuable in this future. Is it a PM? Is it an engineer? Is it a designer? My mind has always been the PM function is like their job is clarify, figure out what to build, clarify what to build, be really clear about the requirements, figure out what success looks like. It feels like that's where the skill is most needed. There's also a design component of like, make this look awesome. And I feel like that's going to be an emerging... The value of that being really good at design and taste and judgment is only going to go up. Before we get to things you've learned about to unblock yourself, because a lot of times, things don't go in the right direction, there's a bug. Without being an engineer, what do you do? Before we get there, is there anything else you wanted to share around, just tips for being successful?