Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:21:52 · Nikhyl Singhal
You don't need 25,000, 30,000, 40,000 people. There's a huge amount of overhead where companies hire not just because they want to have bureaucrats, because they want to expand, they want to try new things. But I think that there's a judgment day that's come back where companies are like, "Look, we aren't getting as much for the staff that we grew in the last five years. This AI thing requires a totally different skillset." The combination is going to mean, this year I predict in the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to see massive shedding of staffs and then massive rehiring. But you might see a company shed 30,000 and hire 8,000, but the 8,000 people they're going to hire are going to all be AI first. The 30,000 they're going to let go of are going to be in combination of, we didn't get as much for those folks that we needed and we want to set the destination differently with a much lighter payload, and that's dark. That's going to make this year and the next year going to be pretty, pretty challenging. I'll transition a little bit to my thoughts on people, but I'll pause for a second to see if this resonates with you.
00:23:13 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:23:13] S0: That's scary to hear. We're going to talk about what folks listening can do to do their best to be in that second bucket of being rehired and kept, because there's a lot you can do. There's a lot of people that know they need to change and adjust and they're not doing anything. Now we want to talk about maybe some of the blockers there. One thing I'll note is, I should have mentioned this earlier, I just did this report on the job market. Interestingly, as of today at least, we have the most open PM roles globally at tech companies in three plus years. The last time it was this high was during COVID, basically. There are some good news there at least for the PM role. I don't know. [00:23:56] S1: Did that surprise you, Lenny? [00:23:58] S0: Yeah, it did, because there's always this sense that, why do we need PMs? What's the point? We have AI to just built stuff, and like- It's the, why do we need PMs? What's the point? We have AI to just build stuff. And my sense, I've always been saying this, I feel like the PM skill is the most important, valuable skill of all the skills. And I know every role thinks this about their role. It's like, no, design. We design more than anything now. But I feel like what you said where it's the deciding what to build, deciding if this is good and great and ready and prioritizing, I feel like that's what remains. So to me, it makes sense.
00:24:29 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:24:29] S1: [inaudible 00:24:29] report came out in a fortuitous time because it was right before I was preparing to come on this show. And the three points I was going to make is builders are going to have the time in their lives. Comps actually up and the Bay Area is essentially back in favor. And I think those three things came very much loud and clear in your report. And I think the question around, hey, why are product managers doing so well? Why are there so many jobs? When in reality, a lot of product people that all of us know are struggling to find a role or we're hearing about these layoffs. I think it depends on how you define what a product manager is. And I think that for the first time, I think that we did have a dramatic shift in what's defined. We three years ago talked about, "Hey, product managers, there's lots of archetypes. Some archetypes are actually more in favor. This was the IC conversation, the builder conversation." Now what we're essentially saying is the information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur. And I think about half of the product people that grew into the industry have that skill and superpower. And then there were a set of people who got into product because they like to build stuff. And folks like yourself who were a founder who that was sort of the motivation into joining the industry, and then they found themselves into this thing called product management. Those folks are builders. And those people are the ones that are being hired by your survey. I think those product managers, everybody wants a builder. And I think that interestingly, lots of engineers are builders, lots of designers are builders, lots of marketing folks are builders. And I think Builders Wanted is going to be the big tagline for the next couple of years. And it is so fun to build. I'll bet you, and this is a prediction, that if you had to choose between preparing a podcast and sitting in Codex or sitting in Claude Code and working on your laptop, you would prefer the latter.
00:26:46 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:26:46] S0: It is so fun. Yeah. Just like progress. You just make so much [inaudible 00:26:49]. It's like, look at this thing go. It's getting better. It's just getting better.
00:26:51 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:26:51] S1: I mean, when I was a PM, I used to take a break and go change the light bulbs in the house. And the reason why I would change the light bulbs is that light bulb was broken, but then I replaced it and the light came on. And man, was that satisfying? Because in a product job, there is very few days of satisfaction because you don't really have the ability to see something broken that gets fixed. It's just part of the challenge in having responsibility without authority until now. Now you can participate in the joy. You can create a design. You don't have to wait for the designer and convince the designer to go and actually work through this or to put your stuff on a backlog. You don't have to do that. And so I think that the builders are going to have the time of their lives, and I think they're going to be very focused on judgment. I think that they're going to invade other functions. I think there's going to be... When I started the group five years ago, we had, for the first two to three years, until we got to about 60, 70 people in this community of head of products, we had one founder. In the last 12 months, as we've gone to about 125, we have 14 founders. 14 people essentially have decided that their next job was not to take another product executive role, but to found. Founding CEO is now open to us. I have one person, very senior person in my group who interviewed for a CHRO position because they wanted a product manager background for the CHRO position. [00:28:46] S0: What is CHRO?
00:28:47 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:28:47] S1: That's the chief HR person in the company. So you would never think that an HR person would be a former product manager, but now forward-leading companies are starting to say, "Hey, we need someone who can bring this obsolescence skill, this judgment skill, this empowerment skill, this builder skill to the function." In fact, the function might be easier to learn than the other parts of the job. And we're seeing that trend that product builders are going to have both a broader range of opportunities up and down the stack, and it won't be product managers, and engineers can become product leaders and product builders, and all of this blurring of the lines is going to take place. I think that unfortunately, the flip side has to be mentioned. I think that non-builders, and I think that anyone who sort of sees themselves as not loving, like sitting down and building something, and there may be reasons why, and we'll get into why you may not be in a position to find the time, let's say. But if you're not a builder, if you're like, "Look, I'm not really into tech." People say this all the time, "Oh, I'm not really into tech." I just really found it to be a lucrative job. It's a role where my ability to communicate, my ability to move information, was where I ended up enjoying it. I love team building, those kinds of nerds, which by the way, I love all those things. But if you don't love building stuff, you're in trouble. And I mentioned about half the people are in that camp. So we're going to have that challenge where they're going to have to find, perhaps leave the tech industry. They might have to. It might be that they want to go build a new business outside of tech, but use some of these AI tools, or maybe they want to find a job completely foreign to tech. But I think that this non-builder piece is sort of a mirror image of the builder growth story that we're seeing.