Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:11:00 · Adam Ward, Lenny Rachitsky
[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. [00:11:25] S0: Awesome. Okay. So let me zoom out and frame the conversation that I'm hoping we have broadly. You have built and are known as someone that can build the most elite, high-talent density teams. So many people kept telling me you are the person that does this better than anyone else. This is every company's and founder's dream, build the highest talent density team. So I'm going to go through this in a sequence. Let's start with something you call the funnel of doom hiring. Talk about the funnel of doom. What is the funnel of doom?
00:11:59 · Adam Ward
[00:11:59] S1: Yeah. And this is a concept I got to recognize my very first as an intern actually in 1998 at a company called Trilogy, which is somewhat of an infamous company around recruiting and it's kind of where I learned to trade. My very first manager, Jeff Daniel, we did this campus tour around the country talking to CS students. And that's where I first heard the term and he coined that term. So I had to acknowledge that. But I think what the funnel did forever, almost forever, as you think about the recruiting history, companies think about recruiting like a funnel, maybe akin to a sales funnel where they think about different stages, pass through rates and things like that. And when you think about how most companies have recruited over these last several decades, it's really been candidates come from three buckets. They apply, they are activated or sourced or they're referred. But if you think about for a lot of companies who think about talent density, typically referrals and sourcing or activation of passive talent is really the focus. And when you even narrow further on this source talent, this is how most companies think about it. I am going to reach out to 100 people. 20 people will reply just for round numbers. So 20% of those will reply. By definition, that is not the top 20%. That is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day for them. Good day for you, bad day for them. And so you're starting with a suboptimal set. You're not starting with the top 20% even if that's what. And then the way we all recruit is we kind of weed people out at each stage and we hire the remainder. So this remainder hiring is the output of the funnel of doom. And when you say that out loud, you're like, that's kind of messed up. If I think about building a talent-dense company over time, is that really the best approach? Or does that kind of get me just above average over time, assuming I have really good interview process and hygiene and all these things? You kind of regress to the mean over time as you get to volume. And so we just think about this in a different way is what if you had confidence upfront of who the top 20% was, and then you use your assessment process to validate that thesis of who those are? That seems like a better... So there's this funnel doom, but there's within a funnel doom, there's this pillar of excellence.
00:14:32 · Adam Ward, Lenny Rachitsky
What if you started with the pillar of excellence and went from there versus having this wide funnel? Because imagine how expensive that is to do remainder based hiring and you hire the person who drops to the bottom. [00:14:47] S0: I love this, especially hearing this. This is how hiring has been forever. And just hear you describe it, it's clear this is not optimal. Why hasn't this changed ever? [00:14:59] S1: There is something detrimental about comparing it to a sales funnel. Because in a sales funnel, as a salesperson, you're typically selling a widget, a piece of software, an item. Those things are relatively static and rational. In recruiting, you have an irrational unit of a hiring manager and recruiter, and then another rational unit of a candidate. And so to believe that things are transactional and linear and passed through in the same ways I think is a bit of a fallacy. But sales has been around for hundreds of years, a long time. Recruiting as a craft or this is like 50 years, 40 years. So we're behind on it, but as humans, we often try to relate a problem to another problem that we know. And so I think this connectedness to sales has been somewhat detrimental to companies as they think about doing this in a more strategic way.