Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:05:54 · Tom Verrilli
[00:05:54] S0: Yeah. The funny thing is I think if you talk to most engineers, or even designers, they will remember the great PMs that they've worked with mostly because they've worked with so many bad ones. And I don't mean that as a disheartening pejorative for folks, but I think it's more if you're being really literally self-critical as a function, does the average PM add a ton of value to folks around them in the way that having really high quality product management can disseminate clarity and absorb ambiguity in the ways that they can or help people make really timely decisions? And I think a lot of it is this function of, as tech companies scaled and we ended up hiring so many engineers, somewhere along the line, and I don't want to pin it on HR, but somewhere along the line, this kind of HR ratio of a pod popped into being. Every time you hire six engineers, you add a designer, you add a PM, you add an EM, and the nucleus exists. And then when you're now serving billion DAU products, you got a lot of engineers. And so now all of a sudden you've got a lot of product managers. And in most cases, you probably don't need a PM for notifications infrastructure. Engineers are perfectly capable of understanding how that works. And in a lot of ways, as we just described, hiring so many PMs infantilizes the engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to because there was always a PM to babysit them. It's certainly less glamorous than people think. Yeah.
00:08:46 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:08:46] S1: Yes, exactly. How do you think about that? Especially as a company scales, engineers having to be in alignment meetings, having to write docs, aligning everyone, taking note, all these kind of minutiae part of PM. And also just the big, engineers want to build, engineers want to code, designers want to design. How do you think about that element of they may not actually want to be doing that work?
00:09:10 · Tom Verrilli
[00:09:10] S0: I think this is where specialization works both ways. It is useful to have folks who are well-honed in making decisions. It's totally reasonable as well for someone to say, "Listen, I'm an infrastructure lead and I want to think a lot about scale, and I do not want to have to spend my time debating alignment or getting those minutiae right." And certain skillsets don't necessarily translate super well. If you're really good at building big mental models in your head of how infrastructure should scale, you may not have the skillset of listening to a customer and actually understanding the core problem as opposed to the thing that they said, which again, just a thing that we've built over time. So my supposition of we regret isn't to say that we don't want product managers. We recognize in those situations that you do need to help other functions specialize. But I think it's we articulate it that way to force ourselves to remember that you don't hire a PM just for the sake of hiring one, you hire one where there's really specific need. And I think what goes with it, Lenny, is you have to build the culture of the organization around that. So for example, when we say we regret product management exists, every time we write documents about how we ship or what we're doing, we're very clear that anyone can bring change forward, that we can have DRIs of new product development that is an engineer or is a designer, but that everybody goes through that same level of function of you've got to go through product review, you've got to actually do the work because it is real work. And if people don't want to do that, if they want to do something else, we can always move product management around. And so rather than mapping PMs to teams where you assume that the PM will always do that, we tend to map them to problems or core projects. And that means that there will be a year more where there isn't a PM attached to a particular engineering team, even though there's lots of ongoing product work to do.
00:10:54 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:10:54] S1: What I love about this is we often hear people at eng-oriented products talk like this, like developer tools where we don't need PMs. Why do we need PMs? And it often comes from companies like Linear, companies that are building developer tools where you could see why engineers are enough. And so it's really interesting to hear from your perspective because you've built very consumery products, very, very consumery products that require what you think are very strong PM skills. So it means a lot, but even more so coming from you that you find that PMs aren't as necessary as people may think in building something great.
00:11:30 · Tom Verrilli, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:11:30] S0: Yeah, I think there was two parts that drove it. And I've certainly, a lot of what I'm talking about here are things that I've definitely learned over time. I spent seven years at Twitch prior to time at Whatnot, and that was very Amazon two pizza team ratio driven. I started in the Valley at Twitter and that was similarly very like you always had this kind of very tight alignment, and God, there was a lot of alignment meetings, so you can imagine why engineers didn't want to be in them. And it's kind of evolved over time to understand that actually a lot of that is just a function of management not being able to see what's going on. And so you hire more folks and you build more layers and your systems beget systems. And I think what's really changing is people are realizing that it's not true anymore that the only way to get leverage is just to hire more PMs underneath you and be more senior, that we've got a better understanding of what's happening in businesses now. It's easier to converse directly with the code base and talk to engineers than it ever has been. And so you don't actually have to get into this all scale thing. And I don't really think consumer or enterprise is the cutting point anymore. I think it's more the culture of the organization itself. [00:12:38] S1: How much of this shift in your mind is AI driven because AI now enables non-PMs to do PME work? And how much of it was pre-AI? And then I want to talk about just what this actually looks like in your team, but let me ask that question first.
00:12:51 · Tom Verrilli
[00:12:51] S0: I don't think it's explicitly because of AI, but I do think AI makes it a lot easier. I think it's two things. I think AI certainly means that there's an enormous amount of leverage for an IC. Now, I don't know how much other people feel this, but I was talking to a couple of our senior leads the other day, and we feel that we're so capable of doing things now with AI that you almost feel a bunch of pressure of the stuff you're not doing because you know that if you carved out a couple more hours, you could move a lot of stuff. It's certainly easier to move fast with AI tooling if you've got well-honed judgment. You can pull data now on a Hex Threads that is basically what it would take a week, two weeks with an Amazon L7 data scientist in 2017. And so if you're empowered and have good judgment, you can basically make really quick decisions and just keep people moving, which is extraordinary. But more than just AI, I think it's also a lot of those ratio pushes also came with a bunch of other cultural pushes like hire great people and get out of their way, bottoms up roadmaps, and all of those pieces where I think there's been a bit of a cultural shift in tech over the last little while, which is like actually top-down's pretty good because folks at the top, generally speaking, can make quick decisions and remove all of this alignment debate. They have probably more macro context than most folks. And assuming that they are genuinely in touch with ground truth and are good enough, it's actually a really efficient model to be able to have senior leadership involved in a lot of those decisions, which means it's not just the tooling that makes them efficient, but you can have one very senior PM across more things and they can be more efficient than having three relatively entry level PMs. But certainly AI makes all of that a lot easier again.