Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:59:52 · Lazar Jovanovic, Lenny Rachitsky
So I was like, "Oh, okay." And that's the big disconnect that I've had all along. So again, if I'm answering your question directly of like, "Okay, what are some of the other tricks? What are some of the other things?" Design. Guys, just expose yourself to exquisite designs. Follow Felix from Lovable. He has an amazing newsletter. And learn how to prompt for a good design, learn about design styles. I didn't know what Bauhaus meant or glass morphism. I had no idea. So I built an app as well for that in Lovable. I was like, "I needed to build an app to learn these styles." So now, it's public. Anybody can see it. It's like some UIstyle.lovable.app. I don't know what it is. It has 18 different styles and prompts to replicate them. So learn what good design means, learn all the design styles, learn how to prompt to get them is probably what I would optimize for at this stage. Yeah. [01:00:56] S1: While we're on this topic, what's your sense of just engineering as a function? Do you feel like there will be a future where software engineers are still a thing? Do you feel like that goes away based on your experience?
01:01:05 · Lazar Jovanovic
[01:01:05] S0: It never goes away. We will need elite engineering more than ever. Because let me tell you this. In a world where everybody builds and everybody's building everything, who's doing the maintenance, right? Obtaining code bases, scaling code bases, maintaining projects, they're still going to be a thing definitely. And obviously, AI is going to be good at this, but again, that requires a different level of skills. Right? It's one skill to build something, it's a completely different set of skills to expand it, extend it and maintain it. And not to mention that in a world where everybody's building, infrastructure suffers. Right? Like, we all know and experienced Cloudflare went down two or three times in the last two or three months, the whole internet goes down. Elite engineers are the ones fixing this. Lovable experiences massive amounts of influx of new users. Infrastructure there suffers. Elite engineers are the ones building the infrastructure to hold the fort. Right? So I think we're going to need a lot of people with really good skills of like, "Hey, who actually builds the world that needs to support billions of builders now?" Because everybody's going to want to learn how to build stuff. How do we teach them? How do we maintain everything that they need? The hostings, the security, the email, the connectors, the APIs, the whatnots. So I think there's going to be room for it, but I'm also on the boat of people like, if I had an 18-year-old brother and he asked me what should I do, I would tell him, "Hey, go become a plumber. Don't go and get a CS degree. Learn a good trade." Because the new generation of millionaires in the US are actually electricians and plumbers and whatnot. Right? So it's a balancing act, I'd say. I don't know. I do still think that good engineers with good sense of understanding where the future is going are always going to be needed and scarce.
01:03:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Lazar Jovanovic
[01:03:08] S1: Such an interesting question. I think to your point, there's definitely going to be, people need to keep building the machines that power all this stuff. Will we need engineers to build actual products, the application layer? That's the question. Is everyone going to be like you? Are designers just going to be all we need? [01:03:27] S0: Everybody's going to become an engineer. And let's speak to that end. I feel like I'm a rapid engineer. I'll refer to myself as a rapid engineer in a year from now, because vibe coding is just coding in 12 months from now. And even today, we spoke about this before. Like, how many elite engineers are publicly admitting, they're no longer hand coding or manually coding, whatever you want to call it. AI writes all the coding. I use the analogy here of like, coding is going to be like calligraphy. You writing code is going to be the equivalent of like, you fine printing on a canvas. And people would be like, "Oh my God, you wrote that code? That's so amazing." It's going to be so rare that it's going to become an art. Right? It's going to be commoditized completely. It already is in a sense. Most elite vibe coders rely on AI. Again, it's an amplifier. Right? So I think everybody becomes an engineer in the world of the future, a designer, a PM. Everybody is a forward deployed engineer or an AI assistant engineer or an LLM engineer or a vibe coder. The term is irrelevant. We're all using LLMs for raw output based on good judgment or bad judgment.
01:04:54 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:04:54] S1: Oh, man. Essentially, these Venn diagrams of engineer designer, PM, they used to be very separate. Now, they're converging and people with a specific, with deeper PM, engineering design background, they can all do the same thing essentially. All the roles are converging. What a time to be alive. And it's so hard to predict exactly how this all goes, but it's fun to pontificate. I want to get back to when you get blocked. Speaking of elite engineers, in reality, you are still writing code using these tools. Sometimes code goes, things go wrong. Bugs are introduced. There's a weird database thing. There's some network issue. What do you do when you get stuck? Do you have a workflow you go through of unblocking yourself?