Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:37:43 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:37:43] S0: Like personal brands? [00:37:44] S1: Yeah, personal brands. "Hey, I've worked for this company, they've delivered products, they've been at scale." So then people are like, "Oh, that person certainly knows what [inaudible 00:37:54] doing." And it's like, "Well, tell me about all the different experiences you've had." But now if every way of building software and how we deliver product is completely alien to how it was in the last 10 years, how you delivered in that sort of version one is going to be less and less relevant. So lots and lots of feedback that I'm hearing from interviews is, put you in a scenario. What tools do you use? What's your judgment? How do you think? It's not about five years ago, you shipped this thing, what was your thinking that went into it? And so how modern you are now becomes the career advice, not did you pick up the established brands? Because what if the established brands is very much working in a way that's not current? You work there for six years, you come out, and it feels like you're in a totally different world. So that's why I think the next two years and these changes are so profound, and quite frankly confusing to people. [00:39:00] S0: That is such an interesting insight that the logo, it used to be fancy to have all these logos on your resume, and now you're saying sometimes that may hurt you because that company's not seen as a very AI forward company. And second of all, people are looking for just like, "What have you actually done? Are you actually aware what's going on?"
00:39:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:39:00] S0: That is such an interesting insight that the logo, it used to be fancy to have all these logos on your resume, and now you're saying sometimes that may hurt you because that company's not seen as a very AI forward company. And second of all, people are looking for just like, "What have you actually done? Are you actually aware what's going on?" [00:39:16] S1: Well, I was just going to say, some of those biggest brands, it's hard to even talk about what you've done. It's like, if you're working at Meta and you spent two years and I managed to make this piece of this algorithm go a little faster, and by the way, it had a huge impact. And frankly, it was incredibly hard to navigate the hallways, and to make that decision and to find incrementality. I mean, as someone who has worked there, I understand and respect that, and that is a promotable achievement, but it just falls very flat on a conversation where someone's living in the future and product is now totally different. So that distinction is the thing that I want to just call out that, "Hey, that's happening every day right now." [00:39:56] S0: So what you're saying there, which is a really powerful point, is that the skills that used to be really valued in product managers are changing pretty substantially.
00:39:56 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:39:56] S0: So what you're saying there, which is a really powerful point, is that the skills that used to be really valued in product managers are changing pretty substantially. [00:40:04] S1: Yeah. And in fact, maybe almost looked upside down in terms of importance. In some ways, we start our careers as builders, many of us, and then we get taught that leverage, scale, organizing, streamline, empowering, enabling. Don't do the build yourself, get others to do it, stop working on the car work on the factory. That is the maturation of our industry. And then you find out that, well, what if it turns out the scale can be done very differently and all we care about is your opinion and what you build. That's very jarring and that's what we're living through right now. [00:40:50] S0: So let's follow this thread of specific advice to PMs right now, whether they're mid-career, senior, getting started. What are some specific things that you think people should do to do well in this emerging future? [00:41:06] S1: Change is really hard for us. And I think as humans, we're not really designed to change very easily. If you think about it, I was thinking about why is it hard for us to change when in some ways change can lead us to much better outcomes. We're almost told to change less as we grow older. When you're a kid, you fall down a ton. But Lenny, when was the last time you fell down? [00:41:38] S0: Not often, except my son loves to pretend like we're falling, so there's a lot of pretend fall.