Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:12:04 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:12:04] S1: Yeah, I had this meetup last Thursday and it was a fun meetup. I have a group of about 125 heads of products, and we tend to gather once a month in San Francisco. During this meetup, we took an approach where lots of people were building things for their own companies or on their own to help themselves with productivity. We said, "Hey, why don't we do a show and tell? Why don't we just have you, if you're a head of product, just show things that are interesting, that are worth explaining." We had a startup go up and show what they're doing, and then we had some insights companies and some late stage companies. It was a few things that were really palpable. One was, there was so much joy in the audience that people were like, "Oh, I've been building this thing and let me show you." Everyone had their laptop and they were one-upping each other and they were like, "Your chief of staff does that. My chief of staff does this thing." That builds on my point that people are having fun being hands-on. But the second thing is that the way they talk about how product decisions are made, the way they talked about how prioritization is determined, the way they talked about how information moves within the company, looked like a completely foreign animal from anything that I had experienced when I was working a few years back. I got up on stage and I said, "If you think about how we work right now and how you folks are all talking about using agents in your enterprise, how you're using chief of staff apps to essentially drive more productivity. How all of you are essentially spending all your time just focusing on judgment and you're spending all your time taking anything that can be obsoleted and writing software around it." I think none of that was even in the language, even in the vernacular 12 months ago. Now, what is it going to look like in 12 months? Everyone had a pause and they're like, "Yeah, it was impossible to anticipate what this conversation would look like 12 months ago." It's pretty hard to understand where things are going. But I would say, I think maybe I'll answer your question around where things are going in the next couple years based on how I think companies are going to change and how people are going to change. I think on the company side, I think that, and then maybe I'll slant it more towards product for a second.
00:14:44 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
Product leaders will increasingly get paid and be asked to drive judgment, and then be the tip of the sphere on trying to essentially obsolete everything else through software, through AI, through agents. This is partly why there's a lot of excitement, because just to be very honest with you and you were a PM and I was a PM, most of the stuff that you didn't like doing are the things that AI is really taking a real crack at. I think that's super interesting. I think that there's a ton of that change that's going to happen. Some companies are doing it now, some companies will do it, but within two years I think most of these companies will obsolete all the mechanical parts of building product. I think that there will be 10 to a hundred times more changes that will be presented to products than ever before, because now the cost of testing something, the cost of changing is going to be much, much lower. When things are changing that rapidly, that judgment piece becomes pretty much paramount. [00:15:52] S0: Just to make sure we understand, when you say judgment, what should people be thinking of when you talk about judgment?