Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:48:43 · Jenny Wen, Lenny Rachitsky
And I think this person is really interesting right now because I think most companies are just hiring senior talent, folks that have done things before, are super experienced, but given how much the roles are changing and what we're expected to do is changing, I think having somebody who almost has a blank slate, and is just a really quick learner and is really eager to learn new tactics and stuff like that, and doesn't have all these baked in processes and rituals in their mind, that's super valuable. So I think those are the folks that I think a lot of us are just overlooking, but I'm really excited about. [00:49:24] S1: This is awesome. On the deep T shape, what's an example of someone in design that has a ... What's a skill that they're really good at? [00:49:33] S0: Sometimes there's designers who are just really technical in a way where they could be 50% of ... they're basically a software engineer. That's really interesting, especially because right now a lot of it is, at least for us, it's like you're working directly with the model, so it helps when you have just deep engineering expertise. But another deep specialist T is just maybe they're just really good at visual design or just designing icons or something, where things like that, given that anybody can make anything, having that deep specialist slant feels like, oh yeah, they can really help differentiate the things that we're building.
00:49:33 · Jenny Wen, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:49:33] S0: Sometimes there's designers who are just really technical in a way where they could be 50% of ... they're basically a software engineer. That's really interesting, especially because right now a lot of it is, at least for us, it's like you're working directly with the model, so it helps when you have just deep engineering expertise. But another deep specialist T is just maybe they're just really good at visual design or just designing icons or something, where things like that, given that anybody can make anything, having that deep specialist slant feels like, oh yeah, they can really help differentiate the things that we're building. [00:50:11] S1: Awesome. Okay. And then there's block shape. We had Marc Andreessen on the podcast, we kind of called it the F shape or E shape, where there's multiple T things, sideways F, sideways E, I guess. Is that what you're describing, where there's many things you're really, really good at? [00:50:24] S0: Yeah. Yeah. And basically, I don't know, if you almost had their skillset, it would look like a block instead of a T. [00:50:30] S1: Because there's so many skills that the T is spread out. [00:50:30] S0: Yeah. [00:50:32] S1: Okay. And the crack new grad. So this is just someone that is eager, open-minded, gritty, very smart, I imagine is a big part of it. [00:50:32] S0: Yeah. [00:50:43] S1: Awesome. [00:50:44] S0: Yeah. [00:50:45] S1: If someone's a young designer trying to break in, trying to be successful, what would your advice be to them to help them have a shot at joining Anthropic, for example?
00:50:56 · Jenny Wen
[00:50:56] S0: I would just say just build a bunch of stuff, try a bunch of stuff out, build actual things. I think that can feel ... I don't really know what the state of design education or education is these days, but at least from back when I was in school, everything was very theoretical, and here, we're going to teach you some approaches and whatnot. But the best crack new grad folks I know are just people who just use the technology, build actual things, don't feel limited by how little experience they might have. I think that sometimes they're actually unburdened by that, because we have expectations of ourselves after being in the industry for so long, but they actually don't and they sort of feel like anything is possible. And so just building a bunch of stuff and sharing it with people, and finding a community of folks that also do that. Yeah. I think my one call it here too, is I went to a school that started something called Socratica a few years after, actually a while after I graduated. And basically their whole thing is building stuff and showcasing it almost like a science project. And I think there's just been a really cool movement there of folks who just build things and do things. For example, somebody built this Claude robot project, this was a few years ago too, where they were just assembling robots that were running on Claude, and then somebody else did something where she just wanted to put Googly eyes on a bus in Boston or something. And there's just a sense of both agency in terms of, yeah, we can just do stuff, but then also this community where people were just trying and building things and sharing things with each other. So whatever that looks like, given the school that someone's from or graduating from, doing that kind of stuff is the stuff that will make people stand out.
00:52:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jenny Wen
[00:52:51] S1: For current designers that are [inaudible 00:52:54] career, [inaudible 00:52:55] senior, do you think that you need to get technical and learn to code, at least build, or do you think you could be really successful and just not lean into that and get better at other stuff? [00:53:05] S0: I think it definitely helps to maybe not learn how to code so much that you're building something from scratch, but it does feel like more and more of the designer's vocabulary right now is implementing some stuff. I wonder though, as the models, both the models and the products get better, I mean, we probably will continue to move up the abstraction layers and you won't have to actually know how each single line of code will work. But I think what I would say is start to bring that into your toolkit, the coding tools, whether or not it's like you're actually becoming technical, I think any designer should just be really aware, and know how to use the tools that are at hand, as opposed to maybe learning and going off and learning React or et cetera, et cetera. [00:53:54] S1: How good of a designer is Claude, would you say, or Claude Code, however you want to describe ... Would you hire Claude as a designer or is it not there yet?
00:53:54 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jenny Wen
[00:53:54] S1: How good of a designer is Claude, would you say, or Claude Code, however you want to describe ... Would you hire Claude as a designer or is it not there yet? [00:54:01] S0: I don't think Claude is there yet. I don't think Claude is there yet in terms of a designer you would hire. I think it is not yet the strong generalist or the deep specialist or the crack new grad. I think it's pretty good at a first pass, and at presenting a bunch of different ideas to you, but nothing there quite feels like special and hireable yet. [00:54:22] S1: Which is good news for designers for now. It sucks at this for now. And I'm so curious to see how good it could get at this. That's such a big open question, is can it pump out amazing novel, unique creative experiences, or it's just never going to be that good as a human designer? [00:54:38] S0: I mean, it's gotten a lot better in the last year or so, even. So yeah. [00:54:43] S1: There's a couple management, I don't know, rituals or takes you have that I've heard from folks that you work with, that I want to touch on. One is that you have this hot take that low leverage time for managers is just not a thing, that there's a lot of benefit you can get out of things that people consider low leverage. Can you talk about that?
00:55:02 · Jenny Wen
[00:55:02] S0: Yeah. Yeah. I remember first becoming a manager, and I think one of the pieces of advice that I either got from a course or a book or something, is like, yeah, "Now that you're a manager, you have to really prioritize your time and categorize your work." And there was this two by two of ... I don't remember what it was in it, but you essentially say, "Oh, these are the things that only I can do. These are things anybody else can do, and everything else, it's low leverage and you shouldn't do that anymore." And a lot of the low leverage things were just things that are really nitpicky in the weeds, or just literally, yes, probably somebody else could do those tasks. But when I think about leaders and managers that I respect the most, I actually think some of their best traits is that they choose low leverage tasks that they take on themselves, and that actually ends up being actually a very high leverage thing, because it's them who's doing it. So one example is whenever you have senior leaders who just test the shit out of the product, and they're just so in tune with it, and they dog food it, they repro the bugs, they spend a bunch of time with engineers sharing the logs and nitpicking and stuff like that. And I think that ends up being super actually high leverage, even though it's a lot of time, of nitty-gritty time, because it creates this familiarity with the product, which I think is really good. It also creates this vibe where it's like, oh yeah, this senior leader really cares deeply and they actually know the ins and out of the product, and they're rolling up their sleeves and they're giving this feedback and working with the team on it. And I think similarly to what I've seen is when a senior leader is able to fix a bug now. I think I've actually seen Mike Krieger before put in PRs himself, and it's really nice because it's like, okay, cool, we're all on this team together and nothing is below this person. And I think another thing that I love that's a little bit more cultural, is when somebody goes out of the way to make somebody's anniversary card or something, and vibe code them something super nice, or make them something, a super nice card, because I think it just shows that it's like an EA or somebody can put together the card, but this leader is just somebody who cares so much about their team that they put in the effort.