Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:13:25 · Nikhyl Singhal
[01:13:25] S1: Yeah. And I think that if you dissect what alignment looks like, a lot of alignment was getting people the right information, the ground-level truth. That problem is dramatically better. And that part of the job, frankly, just absolutely sucked. Whether it was the status report or... I was on projects where there was docs that were sent to me, and then I would change the doc to then send it to my boss, and then that boss would send it to... and it was just this movement of information where the ground truth was buried in some part of the organization, and then there were all these people that were putting on their spin. That, I think, is changing. But to your point, now someone has to decide, and someone has to have an opinion on what to fight for. And that conversation is now much clearer to have. Because you know the ground truth, there's less spin. The CEO can literally ask their agent, "Well, what is the situation? How is this performing? What does this customer really want? How does this affect the system? Is this really something that we want to change the product to enable?" So that conversation can happen, but now people can fight it out with real credence. And if you're a product person that really does have an opinion and wants to make a point, you have a forum. So alignment won't go away. It's not going to have as much theatrics. And I think a lot of companies that are larger do have theatrics that I think AIs are going to remove. And I don't know of many PMs, there's some that lived for the theatrics, but frankly, most of them were like, "This just seems like a fricking waste of time." I mean, it's so telling that 80%, I bet you, this is a statement, 80%, if you truly ask your PM, "Do you really want that boss's boss job, or do you want their day? Not the pay, not the credibility, not the stature, but do you want their back-to-back meetings?" I bet you most of them will say no. And what I'm suggesting to you is that answer is going to change in the next two years.
01:15:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Nikhyl Singhal
[01:15:35] S0: What's really also interesting is, as much as this role is changing, engineering is changing even more. And what I feel like is that the engineers that will continue to thrive are basically going to become more PM-y, because the coding part is now going to be solved. And now it's just, "What should we build? Is this great? Is this the direction we want to go? What does success look like?" So if you're like, " Oh shit, my job is changing," just imagine being an engineer right now and how crazy that must feel. [01:16:05] S1: Yeah. And I think the one advantage that engineers have is they think in systems, and they think about obsolescence more effectively. So I think that when you make a change, you have to decide, is this change going to be sustainable in the product that you're offering? I think an engineer has an edge there. I think the other edge they have is, "I bet you we can build this to be more automated, to be simpler." I think those things- [01:16:29] S0: And the minority goes there. Yeah.