Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:30:52 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:30:52] S0: There's so many directions we can go here. One thing I want to throw out, it's kind of a hot take, and this came from a chat I just had with Amol, a Head of Growth at Anthropic. So he's Head of Growth, he's a PM and he had this really interesting point that as engineers can do so much more, PMs are getting squeezed because they have to stay on top of so many things, so many features, so many ideas, so much talk, so many things being said at them. And there's this push for PMs at companies to ship PRs, build stuff themselves. And what we took away from that chat is the leverage that PMs often have is a lot higher, not spending time coding and shipping, but instead just staying on top of all this stuff. And he's like, "We need more PMs now. There's so much for PMs to do because engineers are so fast." So there's still need for prototyping to explore ideas and ideate and get feedback and align. But he had an interesting take that it's better I don't spend time shipping stuff. It's better I do higher leverage work as a PM.
00:31:57 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:31:57] S1: It depends what he means by shipping stuff because I think that if you have an engineering team of 50 people building things for your customers and you're like, "Hey, I want to be the 51st because that's how I get leveraged." I'm like, "Eh, it's kind of a cheap knockoff of an engineer." If on the other hand, the thing that you're building is ways to stay on top of what the 50 people are doing when in the past that was building tickets and backlogs and all of the things that we used to do to figure out organizations, manage standups, that's the information overload that's happening. What we saw when the CPOs got together is all of the things they're building are ways to drive efficiency out of their product organizations. They're inside the building kind of development efforts. And I'm not sure that for the next five years, we'll continue to build software that way, but I think in the next two years, people are going to change the product operating system that they're working on. And we're already seeing companies that stand up and they say, "Hey, we've fully automated the way we do product reviews. We've fully automated the way we do product standups." So to his point, look, if there's 15, 10 times the amount of stuff happening, we need judgment to determine whether it's good. These are good or bad changes. And right now, if it's manual, we're cooked. So it's a combination of hiring good product builders with judgment and then hiring increasingly folks whose entire job is to build the internal tools necessary to improve the decisioning, but it's not through hiring of humans and building management ethos, which is what it used to be in Zurp. It's actually through technology, but it's a totally different way of building software. And that's what gets people excited because they're like, "Wow, if I do this, I don't have to ever do a status report." I mean, that was a comment that was made. I hate doing status reports. So now I just wrote something and my boss is happier because they get more detail. And that to me is incredibly exciting, but it is a different direction of what you're trying to deliver than something that goes out the door.