Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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things are moving so fast, they are constantly reacting, having to guess at priorities, and having to make do with outdated solutions.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."
00:49:37 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:49:37] S1: Well, and maybe there's a baby version of this that perhaps provides a bit more kind of solace and optimism. A baby version of this is that the way that people did, let's call it product management back in the day when HP, and Cisco, and AMD and these other companies built products that were physical hardware, they had long engineering cycles. There was a discipline called product management that was birthed, and that discipline had a very, very specific, very structured way of working that was essentially imploded when the internet companies came along. And Google, for one, built the APM program because they felt like, "Hey, this product thing that exists in the market isn't really what we need and we're not seeing success. And in fact, we're going to just train from the beginning this new breed." And that then birthed a lot of the current product managers, Microsoft and Meta and other big employers started to create a new version. And for the first few years, it was very jarring because everything that they did that they call product management resembled old product management pretty much in name only. And there wasn't like you go to become a business school, you get a business school degree and all of a sudden you're a product manager, you would have to work. If you build some expertise, then you'd have to come in and help organize and collaborate and all this other good stuff. The next couple years are going to be like that where every three months we're going to have more agents, different forms of judgment. They're blurring the lines on what the role and responsibility, people from different backgrounds coming in, people leaving the... It's going to be chaos. But as a couple of years go by, things will settle. Companies will be built a certain way, and it won't be that you'll continue to change the way you're working. You'll have reached some form of optimization. We're just not in that optimization in any way, shape, or form right now. And so the speed of iteration and how you think about, look, my job is not to move information. My job is to evaluate and I have to think through what does success look like, whether this makes sense for the system. It's a totally different skill. But after a couple years, there's going to be some routineness to it. There's going to be some training. There's going to be consistency.
00:51:58 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
The job you had next is going to look like the previous job. So all I'm making a point is that you need to cross the threshold to stay modern because things are changing, but I don't want to send the point that for the next 30 years, you're going to be on this merit round that's going to spin faster, and faster, and faster, and then you're just going to have to run off the merry-go-round and go vomit in the corner. That's not at all what I'm suggesting. I'm just saying that right now is the moment when if you love building, you have to stay current because you will be happier and you'll be more relevant. And if you don't love building, you have to recognize the industry is moving away from you. That is the key point. And I don't think there's a person that's looking at the current way of building product. I don't think there's a person that's been on this podcast that would disagree with that statement. [00:52:53] S0: That is a really empowering point to make there that this is not forever, that it's a couple years potentially, maybe, I don't know, could be a little bit longer, but it's not a forever thing where you have to do this. You have to lock in and sacrifice forever. This is the moment to get on the rocket, to get on the ship. I don't know, to not miss the boat, whatever metaphor you want to use. [00:53:15] S1: Whatever transportation.
00:53:15 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:53:15] S1: Whatever transportation. [00:53:18] S0: Yeah. So I think that would make me feel better. I think the other, I don't know, the good, again, just to remind people, it sucks to have to change. The good, as you shared earlier, comp has never been higher. There's a lot of open roles. People that are embracing this are having a lot of fun. Most PMs are sitting there all day waiting for stuff to happen, waiting for meetings and approvals and all this alignment and all these PR reviews. And now it's like you can ship stuff so often. There's so much good that is happening. Maybe just remind us again of anything else there just to inspire people to like, "Okay, this is worth it."
00:53:54 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:53:54] S1: I think let's go to the individual you're describing. There's someone who's sitting, who's really afraid, who's a builder, who's like, "Man, my job is changing so rapidly and I'm so nervous and I have to think through what's my career going to look like." But I tend to ask the question like, "Do you really love your day?" If you put green, yellow, and red next to the meetings you had and did that for a week and then we looked at the color chart, I'll bet you the vast majority of PMs that are in a product organization, they show mostly yellow and red. And I'm telling you, the ones that are moving into more of this build mode, it's mostly green and yellow. And yet, most of them are sitting very, very afraid feeling stuck. So what I'm suggesting is how do you then transition mentally and then physically into a moment of going from this moment of fear and being on the sidelines to being in the game? What I have noticed, and this is sort of a big kind of surprise to me, is there's a moment where they experience the first joy in using the new tools. Everyone has a story and it's always different, but it's super personal. It's going to be like, "Oh, I was doing it a certain way, and then all of a sudden I built this thing." And oftentimes it's like, "My partner and I use this app that I built," or, "I built a chief of staff app to keep track of my inbox," or, "I now manage the lights in my house using this thing." And it's some silly thing. And usually accompanies with a story like, "And I stayed up all night," or, "I spent a bunch of time talking to my friends or hacking away," or, "I just spent time talking to Claude about it." Even my wife has a story about how she has this business that she's thinking through and she went from using the AIs to do the business plan, to actually do test market. And everyone has this moment of joy and then they're like hooked. It's like they caught a bug. And at that moment is when they cross the threshold between fear to joy and joy is the biggest anecdote to burnout and it creates opportunity. Because the moment you have joy, the moment it doesn't feel like work. And I think most product management feels like work if you're not building. And we are now moving into a world where product management will be building in joy, not work. So you just need to find a path to get there.
00:56:35 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
And the moment you do, the rest of your human psyche creates time, doesn't feel like you're disappointing others and builds energy because people have more energy than they realize. They're just so exhausted by the monotony of what was defined as product management. And so that is the number one piece of advice is, have you found joy? Now there's a class of person who's like, "None of this is joyful. I find the whole thing to be kind of boring, nauseating. I don't really like it." I'm like, "Well, then you're probably not in for the next version of our industry." And you should be respectful of that and you should be honest with yourself. But there's a lot of product people that are right now very anxious that actually are going to be happier once they cross the chasm and all they need to do is find a way to create that moment of joy, whether that's an app on their side, other app at your work. And if you're a leader listening to this, you should find those moments of joy in your staff because that's contagious and it gets people excited. And that's why I like doing what I do, I like building stuff and I caught the bug and I'm all there all the time. And I try to find TV shows that I can vibe code in parallel to because I want to watch TV, but I want to be vibe coding at the same time [inaudible 00:58:07]. [00:58:07] S0: What's a good show? What's a good show for vibe coding? [00:58:10] S1: Well, a lot of the Amazon Prime shows are good. [inaudible 00:58:14]. [00:58:13] S0: A knock on it.