Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:05:25 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:05:25] S0: So say we've convinced a listener, "Okay, I need to make a change. I need to lean into this. I need to take this seriously. I can't just sit back and hope it all works out okay." And then they maybe found a moment of joy. They built something that's super cool and just like, "Hey, check this out." What other advice do you have for folks listening to help them be to survive... I don't know, let's not say survive, but just thrive in this future that is emerging for product people.
01:05:51 · Nikhyl Singhal
[01:05:51] S1: Yeah, I like thrive. I definitely think that you find that moment of joy, you have the engineering mindset, which is, "Hey, I want to obsolete myself on something that I do today." Again, reduce the less joyful parts of my job is a good starting point. I think that you have to find ability to increase pace. The next two years requires a lot of fire in the belly, a lot of agency that I know everyone talks about. So for example, if you were to leave a job and start a new job, you probably don't view the new job year one at the same pace that you viewed year five in your last job. You need to kind of bring it. If you have a new relationship and if you've come off of a long-term relationship, my suspicion is your first year of that relationship, you put your best foot on. This is what I'm asking. You got to find that reserve. You've got to make time. You've got to maybe disappoint others in a way that you haven't in the past in order to create time for you to stay current, find that joy, obsolete yourself from the things that are not worth it. I think the other thing you have to do is you have to swallow your ego. I don't want a single person saying, "Hey, I was a X, Y, Z leader. I would only consider roles at that same level." I want people, this is an extension of our last conversation, is not only is it in vogue to be hands-on and I see it's kind of a necessity, I need everyone to sort of say, "Look, if everything's changing, it doesn't matter what we've done the past. That brand doesn't matter as we discussed." You have to have an egoless perspective of how to stay current. And you would be not only willing, but actually look for ways to even take something smaller in order to make sure that you're kind of going through the tunnel correctly. And then ultimately, part of the way we swallow that ego is you stay long-term focused. You say, "Look, if the way we build product is changing so aggressively, my job is to spend the next couple of years being on the boat that's leaving the station and going to the new world. Once I get to the new world, the cream rises to the top, I'll take my skills, my leadership, and I'll go through it. But in the next few years, if everything's changing, I definitely want to be current." And that means you have to have a long-term focus. My property is called the skip, of the community and everything.
01:08:24 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
They all kind of come down to this word called the skip. And I chose that word because the best career advice is always not thinking about the next move, but the move after. What's the skip job? What's the skip opportunity? Well, in this world, it's not about what's an opportunity now and what's the journey. It's about making sure that your skip opportunity is saved and you are able to get that high salary, you're able to get one of those premier builder jobs, and that's the world that you have to have and the mindset you have to have. [01:09:00] S0: Something you mentioned earlier was really interesting that in the next five years, you predict that most people's jobs will be very different. What are you imagining there? Will there still be this product manager role? Will PMs need to move closer to engineering? What's the Venn diagrams or spectrum you're seeing of where current PMs may go?
01:09:20 · Nikhyl Singhal
[01:09:20] S1: Yeah, I definitely think that there's a world where PMs go to every industry as what I would call the agents of change because the PMs are the ones that can talk. They're the ones that have the broadest view of the organization, but they look at it through the technical lens. And my hope is that most of our PMs are the first to the tools, and hence they're the change agents within their company. So let's just play this out. In the next year, we start to see all these product organizations changing the way they build product. And all of a sudden, the way we build product is gentrified and really, really thoughtful and really far along. And then 12 months later, the marketing, the sales organization, the HVAC company that was bought by the private equity firm, the school down the road, everything's like, "Boy, we're not current. We're going to get obsolete. Who do we bring in to be in charge of this change? Well, this person works in the future. We need to get to future." So I'm really bullish that product leaders are going to be like those dandelion, whatever you call it, seeds when you blow it and they just go everywhere. I have that vision. Meanwhile, I think a lot of people going into product might be coming from design, might be coming from data science, might be coming from engineering. Because the ones that have judgment, the ones that can talk, the ones that want to stay current, they might be like, "Well, I don't necessarily want to just stay in my lane. I have a point of view as to how this should work." As you said, from a designer point of view, designers may have a lot of those skills and opinions on what it should look like. Maybe their platform won't be the pixels or the visuals, they will be the product itself and they can adjacently move into product. So I think you're going to see this crazy influx and then this amazing kind of exodus. And then you'll also see folks that are like, "Ooh, I don't know if I can get in." So I know that's a confusing kind of set of three changes, but that explains why so many people have anxieties. All three of these are happening instantaneously.
01:11:46 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikhyl Singhal
[01:11:46] S0: There's a line. They thought they buried us. They didn't know that we were seeds that I think about. [01:11:54] S1: I love that. We're into a lot of the darker... [01:11:59] S0: Speaking of that, there's this hilarious tweet that just came out the other day that I have here- There's this hilarious tweet that just came out the other day that I have here, where this guy describes the only four jobs that will remain in the future. So the only four jobs that exist in the future: one is product engineer vibe-code or PM slop-cannon. Number two is security SRE infra person. Number three is hot people, which is getting people to buy your stuff, customer service. Remember, there are many ways to be... oh no, here's how they put it: "Present a easy UX to the world" is that category. And then grownups, which is your point of just like adults. Yeah. So I think there's some truth to this. [01:12:40] S1: I read that and I agree with that. I mean, I think the adults exist and I think anyone that's the top of their field that can talk and that essentially is opinionated and can go broad, that's kind of the third point of hot people.
01:12:40 · Nikhyl Singhal, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:12:40] S1: I read that and I agree with that. I mean, I think the adults exist and I think anyone that's the top of their field that can talk and that essentially is opinionated and can go broad, that's kind of the third point of hot people. [01:12:51] S0: So that's actually... that reminds me. So Amol, the head of growth at Anthropic, made this really interesting point that so much of his time now, more and more, is alignment as a product manager. And we were joking, what's the harder alignment problem, aligning people in a company or AI's AGI? And it feels like that's a remaining... and it's part of what you described, somebody that can get shit done, a change agent. And a big part of that is what a PM often is doing a lot of their time, is creating alignment internally around what we will be doing, what we're prioritizing, that kind of thing.