Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[00:00:00] S0: You have built and are known as someone that can build the most elite, high-talent density teams. Let's start with how people do it wrong. Something you call the funnel of doom. [00:00:10] S1: Companies think about recruiting like a funnel. I am going to reach out to 100 people. 20% of those are all high. By definition, that is not the top 20%. That is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day. The way we all recruit is we kind of weed people out at each stage and we hire the remainder. In your mind like, "Hey, there are 50 people in the world who can do this. Let's go find those 50 people." And you relentlessly pursue and you focus your energy on activating those people, not trying to find them out of the funnel of doom. The mistake that most companies make is they'll say, "Hey, Lenny, who's the best product engineer you know?" That is the worst question you can ask. The better question to ask is, "Hey, Lenny, of all the product engineers you've worked with, who stands out to you as the person who's most collaborative with designers or who can translate a framework into a product better than anyone you've ever seen?" [00:01:02] S0: When you're looking for that first recruiting hire, is there anything you think is important to look for? [00:01:06] S1: Recruiters are excellent at 90% to 110% capacity and are terrible outside of that. If they only have half a rec load, they kind of are useless, but they're kind of great at this edge of adrenaline rush, busy. You want to find those people.
00:01:06 · Adam Ward, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:01:06] S1: Recruiters are excellent at 90% to 110% capacity and are terrible outside of that. If they only have half a rec load, they kind of are useless, but they're kind of great at this edge of adrenaline rush, busy. You want to find those people. [00:01:20] S0: What are some things you've learned about building incredible teams, keeping people working for you over the long term? [00:01:26] S1: When you look at candidate satisfaction scores, the number one thing that's always there is... [00:01:33] S0: Today, my guest is Adam Ward. Adam is known in the Valley as the most effective recruiting leader at building elite, high-talent density teams. He co-founded an independent recruiting firm called Growth by Design, which Cursor acquired fully last year, which is not something that you often hear and is a testament to how good he and his team are and how important talent is right now in today's market. Adam is now head of talent at Cursor, helping them scale and build one of the most talent-dense teams in the world. Prior to starting his own firm, Adam led global recruiting at Pinterest, growing the company from 200 to over 2,000 employees. And before that, he led a global team of 65 recruiters across 10 offices at Facebook, helping them scale Facebook's tech org from 1,000 to over 10,000 employees. [00:03:08] S1: Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. [00:03:10] S0: You've been doing this for 20 years now, hiring, recruiting, building teams. How different is the market we're in today? How crazy is the market and the hiring market we're in today?
00:03:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[00:03:10] S0: You've been doing this for 20 years now, hiring, recruiting, building teams. How different is the market we're in today? How crazy is the market and the hiring market we're in today? [00:03:23] S1: If there's a scale, it's an 11. But yeah, I do think there are similarities to some other markets we've been in over time. You mentioned the years. There was a moment in time where a lot of companies were moving to mobile and there literally was not a mobile engineer. An iOS engineer was not a thing, but there was a scramble for talent to build your mobile app and things like that. There was this moment that was the thing and it has some similarities to that market and moment. I think that really the difference here is everything here is just so compressed. So that mobile moment was two years maybe where there was no mobile engineers and then they were like mobile bootcamp, mobile engineer bootcamps, all these things. And now we're in days, we're in weeks. There are no months or year measures right now. And so what makes us feel very different. [00:04:26] S0: The other thing that feels very different about this market is there's many people doing extremely well. It's the most competitive, as you said, 11 out of 10 for specific roles. A lot of other people are just really struggling, having a really hard time finding jobs.
00:04:40 · Adam Ward
[00:04:40] S1: Yeah, it's a tale of two cities, really. You can read back-to-back headlines of NBA salary offers to a new grad PhD, and the next line being a blue chip company laying off 10% of workforce. How can both of these things be true? And you see this shift of how companies are doing work and getting work done. And I really believe we're in this moment where there's this resettlement of talent and labor and how work gets done. And I really believe that there will be a resettlement and there'll be a shift and this will come back. But I feel like we're in one of the largest gaps of those worlds right now that I believe will, and I want to believe will come back closer together. Yeah, I think one thing that's really in demand is this, and there's lots of different names for it, but this forward-deployed engineer, this technical person who can partner with a sales team and partner with a customer to deploy what can be for some audiences in a company, a very technical and maybe overwhelming product or helping companies think about moving from token maxing to optimizing, maxing to optimizing. And so that's I think a new skill as CFOs start to get the bill coming in. Companies are able to help partner with them to think about what's the best solution for them. So that's a really unique skill because you're deeply technical yourself, you understand the product, but you can also walk into a room with executives and leaders and help conjugate some of that and then even help them deploy that into their workforce. So I think that's a real supply demand issue right now. I think maybe the thing that is waning, I would say, is the specialized technical person. The person who is... Because I think you almost see this squeezing together of engineer product design in some ways where we would love a designer who could actually be more of a design engineer. And we want that super deep technical engineer that has a little bit more stronger product sense. So I think the people who are maybe very narrow, very deep and overly specialized in a way are waning in the same way along that vein might also be the new grad who just hasn't had enough experience to be able to do that, where a product like Cursor or others can do some of that work right now.
00:08:45 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[00:08:45] S0: This is extremely interesting. I haven't heard it put this way before. Interestingly with the FDE role, it feels similar to the mobile example you shared where very few people have actually been forward-deployed engineers. So what's kind of the, I don't know, the look of a person that can become an FDE? [00:09:02] S1: Yeah, I actually think it is that engineer. It is that person who maybe was a full stack engineer in three to five years ago, is now maybe actually that forward-deployed engineer. And you talk to some of these folks and they actually unlock something in them. They're kind of moving out of the terminal and moving in into the company and into the customers and clients. And for the right person, that's super energizing, unlocks another chapter or maybe an unexpected chapter in their career. [00:09:35] S0: That's interesting. I was expecting you to say AI researchers, so this is interesting. And imagine because there's not as many of those roles. [00:09:41] S1: I think so. I think that's a very defined set. And so I feel like it's a very clear bracket of what that is and how many there are and where they are. And I think that sometimes the bigger challenges are the nebulous things or the very new things that I think are sometimes just as challenging as the scarcity ones of an AI or ML engineer. [00:10:05] S0: Just as a final question along these lines, what about just the core product design engineering roles? Are those kind of steady as they've been? Is one increasing, decreasing? How's that looking?
00:10:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[00:10:05] S0: Just as a final question along these lines, what about just the core product design engineering roles? Are those kind of steady as they've been? Is one increasing, decreasing? How's that looking? [00:10:14] S1: I think they're hot. But I think you probably see a lot of conversation out there around this where I think we're getting a little bit back in a good way to the craft of things. And so if you think about what AI can do in the design world, it can also create a lot of slop in its own way. And so I'm an optimist. You'll probably hear that throughout. [00:10:38] S0: Same. [00:10:39] S1: I think it's just a better way to live. But I think what will hopefully help us get back is to the craft of what we do and maybe an appreciation for it. And I see that in the design world too. [00:10:54] S0: And is that in saying ICs are more in demand and especially ICs that have good taste, good judgment? Is that kind of the- [00:11:00] S1: I think so. Yeah. I think we've seen this for maybe the last 12 months, the rise of the power of IC. And the recognition and appreciation for that work, I think has come almost in a full circle moment for them. But I think taste, decision-making, problem solving, these characteristics, curiosity in all the good ways I think are coming back up to the surface.