Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:34:16 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:34:16] S0: That is such a good distinction and it makes all the sense. Basically, it's make yourself scale through software as much as possible. There's a big opportunity and it's fun. It's like you're building your own thing.
00:34:26 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:34:26] S1: That's right. That's right. I think a few other things that I would just note around how things are going to change the next couple of years, I think that adults are still going to be needed. I think companies are going to grow, they're going to grow quickly. I think those that are driving some of these initiatives are classic founders and AI is great at supplementing a lot of things, but I think judgment comes in the form of a combination of expertise and wisdom. And so I think that increasingly I hear from my groups that, "Hey, I'm attractive to this company because I have wisdom, but I stay hands-on. I have credibility with the founder so I can have a conversation with that individual in his or her language, but I have weight to my thinking. I have seen the movie. I have experience that actually would help them as they take this turn." So adults are still going to be important. I think pace will continue to go up, partly because people will want to feed the beast, the sort of LLMs that are running at night. And I think partly because there's just such an opportunity to keep moving so much faster. And I think that's going to be dizzying and I'm not excited about what that causes for burnout. Sadly, I think that geography and actually diversity is going to take a step back. I think that we were very good about driving more breath. As we grew the industry, we started looking at people who were from different backgrounds to populate it, including different locations. But I think that because the AI wave is so heavily coming from the Bay Area, and because companies are hiring fewer folks, they're hiring people that look and act like themselves. So age, gender, I think, ethnic backgrounds, all of those are taking a hit. And I think that we will have stepped back quite a number of years in the diversity of what we do. And so I worry, I mean, this is my personal worry, but I worry about that probably more now than I did in the last five years, because I think it's an underbelly of what we're seeing. And I don't think that anyone's intentionally doing anything, but I think when pace is so high, the fact is that women are having kids in those power years and they just don't have the time to allot to spending their nights and weekends in Claude Code. And so that's an impact. And we don't talk about it as an industry, but it's absolutely true.
00:37:11 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
And then the last thing I would just say, and maybe this goes into some of the advice as well, is I think that one of the most surprising shifts we're seeing is your brands don't matter as much as how modern you are in your ability to deliver product. In the past, I think for the last 10 years, it's like, have you seen the movie before? And even in this last podcast episode we did, Lenny, we talked about, hey, brands matter, you really need to make sure. [00:37:43] S0: Like personal brands?