Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:24:13 · Jenny Wen, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:24:13] S0: Yeah. [00:24:18] S1: Okay. So then as a designer where in this profession, craft and great experience and quality and trust are such a core part of the job, to help instill that in the products, because that in theory leads to really successful products in companies, how do you just think about maintaining craft quality, trust, as your products are just shipping 1,000 times a day, and you're not able to stay on top of them and there's no designer involved?
00:24:46 · Jenny Wen
[00:24:46] S0: It's not that there's no designer involved. It's more just like it's almost that there's too much for one designer to handle. But I think with this, I think about where the features or products are, where they are in the cycle of adoption versus early preview. So for example, we sometimes will launch things and we will say, "Hey, this is a research preview. It's early. It's going to have a bunch of these flaws," and we caveat that a bunch. I think Claude Cowork is actually a good example of this, where we labeled it a research preview and we put it out there knowing that, "Hey, this is similar to our models. This is the worst it's ever going to be, but we're going to put it out there because we believe, internally we've tried it a bunch, and there's something really powerful here that some people will benefit from. It might not yet be the easiest to work with. It might not be the highest quality. It might have some issues with it, but we're going to put it out there because we believe the benefits outweigh the cons." I think that is okay to do, especially when there is something really valuable with the product already, and it's worth putting it out there. But I think the promise you sort of have to make your users is like, "Hey, we're going to put it out there, but we're going to iterate. We're going to take your feedback and we're going to iterate and we're going to make it better." And you have to commit that. You have to show that to the world, you have to respond to people's feedback, and you have to show that you are continuously shipping and improving it. Because I think the way that you really lose trust around quality and releasing something early, is if you release it early and then nothing ever happens. That is something that degrades a brand. But whenever you put something out early, it's possible to do that and maintain the brand of your company. And I think that's something that we've been doing pretty well. And I think anyone who's listening can take away from it, it's like, yeah, well, we're continuing to do that. And I think that is actually really fun for me as a designer, because you put something out there and you actually learn and you get feedback about it immediately, and you know what to do next.
00:26:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jenny Wen
[00:26:55] S1: The way I've heard you describe this is building trust through speed. [00:26:58] S0: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's building trust through speed, but also just making people feel like they've been heard and that we're fixing things based on what they're trying to use it for, and their feedback is actually appreciated and used.
00:26:58 · Jenny Wen, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:26:58] S0: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's building trust through speed, but also just making people feel like they've been heard and that we're fixing things based on what they're trying to use it for, and their feedback is actually appreciated and used. [00:27:11] S1: Yeah, it's clear when the labs launch stuff, and you all are very good at this, everyone on the team is tweeting and just responding to tweets and comments and then shipping, "Hey, we fixed this yesterday and this is happening." So there's a clear sense of, "This is just today and we know this is broke and we will fix it." And then because Claude Code can code very quickly, the fixes come very fast. Okay. So another big question that people are asking that I ask a lot on this podcast, is around just what skills become valuable? And another way I've been thinking about it, Lex put it this way recently, is where will human brains continue to be valuable as AI gets smarter? So we've gone through this progression of tab completing [inaudible 00:27:56] segments of code, to 100% of code is written by AI now, it's crazy, to now AI is reviewing its own code. Boris on the podcast recently was saying Claude Code is now helping them come up with ideas and decide what to build, which is like, okay, wow, look at that. Look at it go. The whole product workflows, the product development process slowly get eaten up by AI. So the question is just where will human brains still be useful, at least until we have super intelligence? Do you think AI is going to get very, very good at taste, judgment, design?
00:28:30 · Jenny Wen
[00:28:30] S0: I think it will get better at taste and judgment and design. Yeah, I think we might be holding onto that a little bit too much and saying, "Oh yeah, a designer or somebody will always know the best thing to ship or the best version of this." But I do think AI's sense of taste will get better. At the end of the day, someone has to decide what is actually going to get built and what actually matters. And when I think about people saying, "Oh, AI is just going to build this software for us," a lot of the hard parts of building software are actually not building it. If you think about the hardest times that you've had at work, Lenny, it's probably things like, oh, you and some other person disagreeing about what should go into this feature or what shouldn't go into this feature. And those things still feel like, yes, AI can weigh in, but it can't necessarily solve this dispute between you and somebody else. And so there is something about deciding what actually goes into the things we build, which I guess is taste in some way, but maybe not taste in the way we think about aesthetic taste or whatnot. There's some sort of, it's judgment around what to do next.
00:29:45 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:29:45] S1: Just watching how quickly AI took over coding, which, I think a year ago, definitely two years ago, most people are like, "I don't think so. I don't think AI will get this good." And that the best engineers in the world trusted so much, they're not even looking at the code anymore. That's where we've gone. It just made me reevaluate all these assumptions I've had about, okay, AI will never be as good as really good PMs, designers, at judging what is great and deciding what to build. But I'm just starting to think, I think it will get there. Even an example you've shared, it could give these two people trying to make a decision, "Here's all of the data you need to make a decision and here's why this is the right answer and just press yes, press one, and I'll go ahead and build this." So I think to your point, I think we undervalue just how good it'll get at this stuff. Okay. So your sense is it'll get better, but your sense is we'll still need awesome designers to be involved, us and PMs, to help make these decisions, engineers, of course?