Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:41:38 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:41:38] S0: Not often, except my son loves to pretend like we're falling, so there's a lot of pretend fall. [00:41:43] S1: And when you pretend fall, it's probably pretty jarring. It's probably relatively new. [00:41:48] S0: Yeah. For him, it's so fun. He loves it, but yeah, for me, I'm like oh, my God, such a long ways down.
00:41:52 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:41:52] S1: it's no fun, right? Yeah. And I think that it's funny because you watch kids and it's normal for them to reinvent everything they do. "Oh, I'm learning to crawl. Oh, now this walking thing, crawling, that's not for me." It's why kids learn languages so quickly because they are not afraid to make mistakes and they go through things much more rapidly. It's why you teach your kids to learn how to ski early because boy, I've just made a decision. Hey, I've never been a skier and I'm just too old to do it. "I think that we are trained to find a happy medium and then make as few changes as possible, find a partner, get settled down, find a job, try to stay. It's a failure to transition to a new job if you can avoid it. That's our entire model. And so we create also, in some ways, a mental block around this idea of reinventing oneself. When you are told to reinvent, to when you are told to change, your first thing you think about is it really necessary? Boy, it seems exhausting. I worked so hard to get here. Why would I need to? And I think in the most inner psyche of some of us, its, that just wasn't the deal. The deal was I did what I was supposed to, went to school, I worked hard, I got a job, I built the brand, I got to be a manager, I'm making the income, I have the whatever it might be, the partner, the family, all this stuff. You're telling me after all this time, I got to start over. It sounds fun. You read Twitter and you're like, "Wow, these people are doing all this crazy stuff." But in the back of your mind, it's like, "I just don't know why. Why did we get here? I don't want to do it. I want to go back to the world where I can just keep doing things." So I think this block is actually at the heart of the matter today, and it's a skill reinvention, and it requires time, but time is so hard to find in your power years for the reasons we mentioned with so many... Your goal when you're in your power years is to equally disappoint everyone in your life, which sounds like a horrible statement, but it's true. You have six hours to give, eight hours to give, 12 hours to give, and you have 20 hours of demand. What is your prioritization mechanism? I am going to equally disappoint everyone, not disappoint one group.
00:44:25 · Nikhyl Singhal
My parents will not be more disappointed than my kids, than my health, than my family, than my friends, than my partner, than my work, than my retirement account. That's essentially what your mindset is. It's I need to equally disappoint everyone. Now you're telling me that the number one thing is to reinvent. When I'm barely able to manage this disappointment algorithm. It's quite dark that I think that that is the setup. And then the worst part is these two other psychological factors. One is, okay, fine. I'll take a week off and I'll go figure out what people are doing and what the latest is. And then it turns out three months later, that week off is now antiquated. You got to keep doing it because the target keeps changing. It's not like, I went from not having a job to having a new job, and then I kind of grinned and bear and got through it, and now I'm back in flow. It's like, I'm never in flow because I got to keep doing this over and over and over again. And the most surprising observation I made is that the ones that were the best at working in the past, the ones that mastered the old game, find it the hardest to go through this reinvention stage. It's this sort of shadow superpower thing that I talk about. The better you are at mastering one system, the less likely you are to sort of recognize the new one because your entire world is like, this is working to me. And so the weaker you are, the more excited you are about changing. "Hey, what I'm doing isn't working, might as well change it." But if you're really good, you have no incentive to change, and perhaps even your employer sees you're doing great, and the company itself is in this moment. So all of these things, whether it's the shadow, whether it's the exhaustion, whether it's the time, whether it's the fact that the target's moving, creates this reluctance to reinvent. But the number one piece of advice, to answer your question, is you have to have the courage, you have to believe, you have to have the power to essentially say, "Look, I know the way we work is changing, and I need to stay modern, I need to stay current. So I am going to cross that mental threshold, and I'm going to prioritize that above all else." That crossing the threshold is the key.
00:46:59 · Nikhyl Singhal
And I'll talk a little bit about how one does that, but I think that, I mean, if there was one thing to get away from today's discussion is every person listening to this podcast needs to find it in themselves to cross the threshold around embracing reinvention. That is the world that we live in now.
00:47:20 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:47:20] S0: Nikhyl, this hits hard. I told people you don't sugarcoat stuff and this is what we're experiencing now. I am so excited to tell you about this season's supporting sponsor Vanta. Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like Cursor, Ramp, Duolingo, Snowflake, and Atlassian earn and prove trust with their customers. Teams are building and shipping products faster than ever thanks to AI, but as a result, the amount of risk being introduced into your product and your business is higher than it's ever been. Every security leader that I talk to is feeling the increasing weight of protecting their organization, their business, and not to mention their customer data. ... their organization, their business, and not to mention their customer data. Because things are moving so fast, they are constantly reacting, having to guess at priorities, and having to make do with outdated solutions. Vanta automates compliance and risk management with over 35 security and privacy frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA. This helps companies get compliant fast and stay compliant. More than ever before, trust has the power to make or break your business. Learn more at vanta.com/lenny. And as a listener of this podcast, you get $1,000 off Vanta. That's vanta.com/lenny. What I think about as you talk about this is, I don't know if you saw this, they asked all the heads of the AI labs like Demis, and Sam Altman, and Dario, just like, "Okay, if everybody agreed to slow down and stop this stuff, would you do it?" And they all said, "Yep." Which says a lot about just they're all freaked out a bit about how fast everything's going, how much is changing. And then there's the reality of, but that is not going to happen because the game theory of it all is it doesn't work. You can't slow down because no one will actually slow down. Whoever doesn't has a huge advantage. And so I think there's just a big part of this insight is just like this is happening and there's nothing you can do to slow it down or stop it. And you could either try to pretend like it's no big deal and it's going to be all right. Or you could, as you said, get over this hump of just like, "Okay, I need to lean into this and see what I can do."