Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:00:00] S0: The skills that used to be really valued in product managers are changing substantially. [00:00:04] S1: It's going to be kicked off. Our industry is very much in stress. Nothing's constant. Everyone's in a state of alert. If you talk to product leaders three years ago, their day was largely moving information. The information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur. [00:00:22] S0: I just did this report on the job market. Interestingly, we have the most open PM roles globally in three plus years. [00:00:30] S1: This is a complete renaissance for the product industry, but it comes with a lot of streams attached. In the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to see massive shedding of staffs and then massive rehiring. You might see a company shed 30,000 and hire 8,000, but the 8,000 people are going to all be AI first. The builders are going to have the time of their lives, but if you don't love building stuff, you're in trouble. [00:00:57] S0: What are some things that people should do to thrive in this future that is emerging? [00:01:01] S1: You have to find the ability to increase pace. You got to find that reserve. The next two years requires a lot of fire in the belly.
00:01:01 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:01:01] S1: You have to find the ability to increase pace. You got to find that reserve. The next two years requires a lot of fire in the belly. [00:01:11] S0: Today, my guest is Nikhyl Singhal. Nikhyl is, in my opinion, right now, the number one best source of career advice for product managers and for tech people in general. He was a longtime exec at Meta and at Google, CPO at Credit Karma. He's also a four-time founder, and he leads the best community out there for heads of product and chief product officers called the Skip Community. He also has a larger community for tech professionals called the Skip Coach. Through these communities and his 30 years of building consumer products at scale, and also his podcast, which I've recently partnered with, he's constantly gathering and meeting with and speaking with top product leaders around the world about what's happening, and what's changing in the lives of product managers and tech workers in general. [00:02:34] S1: Yeah. Thank you, Lenny. I appreciate version two. All my notes were like Lenny version two. I'm quite excited about being back on the show. You've done so well since the last time that I've visited, and appreciate the opportunity to share with you my current thing.
00:02:34 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:02:34] S1: Yeah. Thank you, Lenny. I appreciate version two. All my notes were like Lenny version two. I'm quite excited about being back on the show. You've done so well since the last time that I've visited, and appreciate the opportunity to share with you my current thing. [00:02:51] S0: Yeah. You were actually one of the launch episodes, the first 20, 30 guests that I had on the podcast. This was two or three years ago, something like that. A lot has changed in the world of product management since then. We're going to be basically spending this entire episode talking about what is changing in the role and the career of a product manager. What I especially love about you, talking to you and hearing your insights, is you don't sugarcoat what's going on. You're very real about, here's what you need to know about what is going on. We're going to be talking about the good and the bad and just a lot of advice for product managers in particular. To kick things off, give us just the big picture view into what is changing for product managers, the good, and then maybe the scary stuff. [00:03:37] S1: Yeah. It'd be a lot shorter of an episode if we just talked about what didn't change. [00:03:43] S0: Wow. That says a lot.
00:03:45 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:03:45] S1: Maybe I'll start with this. I think that when we first chatted, it was like in maybe the end of COVID, I think the ZIRP era, as we called it, zero interest free money from investors was just cresting. We talked about how ICs are now more in demand. We talked about how these first round of layoffs are existing, that X growth companies are going to be a struggle. But if you really talk to product leaders that were in that mode maybe three years ago, they weren't very happy. What I mean by that is their day was largely a day of moving information from one to another. Let me frame the way that my team is presenting the information to my boss so that that person can frame it to their boss's boss. Generally, the function had become extremely focused on responsibility without authority. That is the greatest form of workplace stress. Now, we don't talk about that. We talk about all the stresses that we have today. Boy, AI is going to replace our function, et cetera. But the honest truth is if you think back, if you've been in product for a handful of years, that was a tough time. Now, people were being paid well. Layoffs were just starting. The industry was huge. It's the biggest it's ever been. There were more product managers, more CPOs than ever had existed in history. What's changed is people are having fun again, particularly product folks, because they're able to build. They don't have to rely on as many people to have impact. There's much more of a direct connection to their ideas and their ability to test and connect their product instincts to their customers. In many ways, this is a complete renaissance for the product industry. For a lot of the strongest builders in the group that I'm associated with, compensation is an all time high. They have more offers than they've ever seen. They see their next job maybe being a founder, maybe being a CEO, maybe being in another function other than product, but being in the C level. They're feeling like there's more opportunities than ever before, so that's the good. I would say in all honesty, it comes with a lot of strings attached. I think that it starts with just being exhausted. I've never seen an industry that's more tired than they are now. I think we were tired during COVID, but for different reasons. Now, I think nothing's constant.
00:07:07 · Nikhyl Singhal
Once you figure out how to do your job, in the past, you would be fine for a decade until you became a manager, and then you would be fine until you became an executive. Now, if you don't stay up in the next three months, they'll be like, "Oh, you're doing that thing? We stopped doing that three months ago. We don't do that anymore. Oh, PRDs, well, that's not even a... " Everything feels like everyone's in a state of alert. I think that in addition, now you're hearing tens of thousands of people are being shed by larger employers that are also hiring and paying triple wages. That's mind-boggling, but depending on your perspective, you might be on one side or the other. I think that particularly a lot of the mid-career people, people that are like, let's call it in their 30s, life plays this cruel trick on you where you end up having your best, most energetic years of your career, your power years of career, because you finally have figured out what you're doing. But at the same time, you may be settling down. You may have kids, your parents are aging, and you, for the first time, have those aches and pains in your body. You have to think about diet, you can't eat cookies every day, you have to exercise. Between your health, the family and friends that you hardly ever see, your parents, which are now worrying because you have to build a different relationship with them, they're becoming dependents, your actual dependence with your kids. Then, oh, by the way, your work, which will take whatever time you have, but it also changes all the time. That generation is insanely stressed historically. Now, we're like, "Hey, stay up. What's the latest in Claude Code? They changed it this morning." It's dizzying. I think there's joy, but there's fatigue in a way that I haven't quite seen before. I think that how people would describe it and how I describe it is slightly different. I tend to be more around like, when people are doing better I think they have more choice and they're long-term going to be happier. From that perspective, I think people that are at the top of their game are doing much better. For the reasons I mentioned, they're just more interested in their jobs.
00:10:18 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
I think that they're more stressed, but I think they're stressed because they wish they had more time to feed the LLM at night, which is a different form of stress than the stress that they experienced in the past, which is, "I don't know if my point or my team is going to get through the malaise of decisioning that exists here." I think that people are doing better. However, I think our industry is very much in stress. I think that on average, people, even if they're doing well, they feel more stressed because they worry they're either not keeping up or they worry that this industry is going to change and essentially they'll be roadkill along that way. That has a lot to do with people are not generally that arrogant, and they don't always believe that everything's going to work itself out and there's a lot of evidence that things are changing. Change is hard on humans. I think that there's a combination of both, but I think the best people tend to be feeling great right now. [00:11:45] S0: We're going to talk about, of the people that are doing best, what are they doing differently? But before we get there, let's think about the future of where things are heading. You talked about a bunch of the things that have already changed and how different the world of product management is. What do you think will change further in the next couple years to give people a sense of where things are heading?