Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:57:03 · Lazar Jovanovic
[00:57:03] S0: If we measure success in the right terms, again, AI, as you pointed out, regardless of your background is an amplifier. So if you don't know what you're doing, you're just going to produce garbage faster. One thing, again, I just want to double down on is in the old world, good enough was good enough. Right? Because even producing good enough was not easy. Right? 10 years, 15 years ago, just producing was more than plenty, more than good enough. You built a SaaS, who cares how it looks like? It works. It does stuff [inaudible 00:57:42]. "Oh my God, I'm so much more productive." Today, if good enough was here, let's visualize it for people. If this was pretty bad, could be better, mediocre, good enough, world-class, if this was the gap between good enough and world-class, well, guess what? The gap is now this, because everybody produces good enough with AI. Absolutely everyone does it. So now, learning and optime it for, how do I produce world-class and magic, is the key lesson to take away today. As you pointed out, I think PMs are the winners of AI today because they bring clarity. If I was a betting man, as they say, I'd bet that the next class that wins are designers. Because we're training these tools to be more clear, to be better, to make better technical decisions. I don't think we will train them just yet to make better emotional decisions. And I think design is all about emotion and that's where the level of the skill up needs to come. That's the biggest level up. If you ask me, like, "Oh, what is the main thing you figure out when you joined Lovable? What's the biggest personal upskill?" Let's say, working with Felix, Nad, Abby, all of the people that are designers, just really what moved and shifted the needle for me. I'm like, "Oh, so this is how world-class looks like and this is what it takes." Right? I always use the analogy of like, I wanted to steal one of their designs and bring it into my Lovable project. So I went into Figma and I was like, "Let me just take this background and just put it in there." I went in and realized that what could be interpreted as a pretty simple or rather simple gradient, took 50 different layers to produce. So I clicked on that component. I was like, "Oh my God, this is not three colors. This is 50 colors." And not just 50 colors, 50 colors with different gradients of levels of opacity.