Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:58:13 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:58:13] S0: A knock on it. [00:58:16] S1: They're built on books. These books are like, they're structured and all that. So Alex Cross or Jack Ryan. You know what's hilarious is... And when you get older, you remember shows that you love, but you don't remember the plot. So one time I just binge watch a season of 24, the show that I loved back in the day. But frankly, I watched it and I kind of knew what was going on, but I vibe coded the whole time because it was like, "Hey, I'm paying attention here, but I'm staying engaged." [00:58:51] S0: Wait, let's actually follow this thread. Just like, what's your AI stack? What are you using to build, and what's something you built and something you vibe coded?
00:58:59 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:58:59] S1: I kind of am pretty all in on Claude these last three months. I was, for a month, pretty aggressive on Codex because I found some of their newer stuff to be, especially with the highest level of reasoning to be quite advanced. I find it hard to switch between tools I try to standardize to be direct. Look, the things that I build, I build a bunch of web properties for my community. So anytime I see something that I can obsolete and code, I try to build code around it. So if you had 100 people, one natural thing you want people to do is to meet each other and 100 people can't meet 99 other [inaudible 00:59:42]. So you have to be thoughtful around who's the best person to meet and how do you match people up? How do you make sure that you match people with people they haven't met before? What are their haves or their wants? That entire thing used to be me sitting down and thinking like, "Oh, Jay-Z would really appreciate meeting Annie, but I don't know if they've met before." Now I write software to do that. I write an agent that goes in and actually does matching. I write an agent to figure out, "Hey, what are all the jobs that my head of products are hiring? How do we make sure that we make those available, but then build a mailing list of folks who I think when they're interested in work can get matched up automatically." So the next generation of recruiting. I think a lot about using AI for content. So when I sit down, I have an AI that takes questions from people and then it's trained on my content and it gives answers. But then I read those questions, evaluate the answers, and I'm like, "Hey, this is a theme I'm hearing." And then I sit down and I write down, when do the LLMs and I disagree, I go through. And so all of these things or anything that I'm doing that I think I can replicate, I try to obsolete myself. When I started my first job, I asked the best engineer that I worked with, who still is one of the best engineers I've ever met, "What's the definition of a great engineer?" And I thought it would be like, "Oh, someone who's got this degree or is well versed in this technology stack." He's like, "Well, the best engineer I know is my dad." And of course, this was before tech in that case. And he's like, "And my dad's definition is still my favorite, which is an engineer is someone who obsoletes themselves from everything they do.
01:01:34 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
That's the definition of a great engineer." And I've taken that to every job that I've worked at. And it's funny because you'll run into people that are like, "Oh no, no, I don't want to obsolete myself. That's my job." And I was like, "Ah, I think if obsolete there'll be a better job for me." What AI has done that has basically put an [inaudible 01:01:57] on that. If you can obsolete by just asking the AIs to do this for you. So why I'm saying that is my stack is what can I do to obsolete anything and everything I do on a daily basis? [01:02:10] S0: That is super cool. I love hearing these stories. What I find as the best tactic here is just solve your own problem. Think about something that's not great in your day-to-day or something you just want to improve and just like... And it sounds so easy. All you do is go to, I don't know, Lovable or install Claude Code, download Codex and just tell it. I want to build a dashboard to control my Sonos and then it just tells you, walks you through everything you need to explore. And so that's a pretty advanced thing to try, but it's just like English. It sounds like I have no know-how to do this. You just tell it. Here's what I want to do, just like a person and it helps you figure it out.