Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:41:24 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tara Seshan
[00:41:24] S1: What's really interesting about this answer is the very human part of it. It's you, it's Andrew, it's Tibo, it's the team just being obsessed with the customer, the product. And it's not like AI was the answer, it's the humans that made the difference. [00:41:39] S0: Yeah. The team deserves full credit here. Everyone on the team is incredibly thoughtful and independent and to the point of there are many founders at OpenAI, almost everyone on that team, the desktop team especially, acts like founders and cares about every piece and every detail. And when they notice an area that should be better, they go build it very independently and get the thing up and running. And if it doesn't test well internally, people aren't using it, if people don't find it useful, they'll iterate on it and then finally ship it externally. But that loop is full credit to people on the team and individuals for making that happen. [00:42:20] S1: Something you touched on is this idea of roles overlapping, this idea of engineers are doing PME work, you're doing probably shipping prototypes and building, maybe shipping to production. I don't know. It feels like that also creates a lot of challenges. I hear from a lot of people, "What is my job now as a designer? What am I responsible for? What am I not responsible for? As a marketer, what am I doing?" Is that something you notice? Is that something that you're dealing with? Just any thoughts along those lines.
00:42:48 · Tara Seshan
[00:42:48] S0: I think the thing I've always liked the most about working at startups, and sometimes I've started at a startup that accidentally grew into a large company, but largely primarily working at startups, is that there are very few boundaries around your role, that everything and nothing is your responsibility. But ultimately, you're accountable for success. Actually, Stripe was very, very much this way where there are no boundaries around what a engineer could do versus a product manager could do versus a designer could do. Everyone could do anything. And so actually it feels like I've always really loved that mentality and now finally capability is catching up to that. But the thing I really care about is that someone needs to look after or have core accountability for, is this product being used by users? Is it something that people want? Is it high quality? Is it effective? And whether that person is an engineer or designer or a PM or whomever, someone is the DRI. And then whatever work needs to be done to make that possible, certainly people can pick it up based on their affinity, based on their capability. But I like a team that doesn't really mind what the boundaries are between individual roles, but everyone's just focused on making the outcome happen. The converse of this is I also really love, the craft aspects of being a PM. There are so many aspects to PM craft that I know folks like Shreyas or maybe Marty Cagan, or Shishir, all these people have really espoused that I think are wonderful. And sometimes maybe some of these questions come from, "Wait, I so love the craft of my domain. By taking this more fluid approach to teamwork and collaboration to get something done, do I lose out on getting better in polishing my craft?" And I truly don't have an answer for that question. I think it's something we're all experiencing together, which is some pieces of our craft are actually getting abstracted by models being able to do it really effectively, maybe better than individuals can. And your craft moves from being able to do that very specific task you did in the past to now applying it to some other part of the product or the discipline.
00:45:06 · Tara Seshan, Lenny Rachitsky
But yeah, that is still a question I'm thinking about, which is how do I balance my desire to be part of a team and use these tools and feel so compelled by how effective one can be now with all these products, with my love of the... Yeah, it's really fun handwriting code for an engineer all the time and one doesn't really do that anymore. [00:45:28] S1: Yes, that's where I was going to go. It's just unbelievable how different the engineering role is now. It's like you used to write code all day, that was your job and that is no longer your job, and that happened so quickly, like you do not write code. [00:45:42] S0: I see people mourn the flow state of writing code manually yourself versus now what one does. Yeah, it's a tough transition. [00:45:54] S1: Yeah. And some people love it, some people don't, and that's a whole other topic. Along those lines, something I'd like to ask people at the frontier of AI is, where do you think human brains will continue to be valuable in the future? It's impossible to predict long term, will we need humans? Hopefully. But I'd say in the, I don't know, the next couple years, just where do you think human brains will continue to be most valuable?
00:46:19 · Tara Seshan
[00:46:19] S0: I think humans will continue to be the most valuable certainly as an entity of accountability, so who ultimately owns the outcome here. In some ways you can think of your agent that you're working with as your report. Ultimately who owns, what was the end product? Was it high quality? Was it a thing that you wanted it to do and say? That will certainly remain a person, at least for now, and especially in industries and places that are highly regulated or require a direct human interface. That makes a ton of sense to me. I think the human brain is also really valuable for expression. I had mentioned earlier that analogy of software is not like real estate, it is more like a film where you could put money and a great film does not come out. The greatest films are not the ones with the biggest budgets. And given that there's a certain artistry and opinionation and expression in building software where you feel like there's some authorship by a person or a group of people, and that part remains, to me, so human. What you choose to build and how it feels, feels like such a human question. I also think the human brain continues to be valuable in how we care for each other and relate to one another. That piece of my work has remained so human and has actually become more important than ever. The part where you talk to other people on your team and collectively figure out how you can be enthusiastic about a area, how you learn and work together, how you elevate each other's ambitions, all of that feels and remains such a human thing to do. Yeah, I think the human brain will continue to be so valuable in that regard. That said, I can't predict what'll happen with the models. But those pieces feel to me to be incredibly, incredibly human.
00:48:18 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tara Seshan
[00:48:18] S1: I love that answer. There's this idea that you talked about, this idea of this overhang of what AI is capable of and what we're actually doing with it. It feels like one of the biggest gaps is like, okay, what should I do with it? I'm curious, what are some ways that you use AI in your work that may inspire people like, "Oh wow, I didn't think about using it that..." There's two buckets here. One is just how your PM job has changed most, thanks to AI, that you're just like, "Okay, now I use AI for this stuff." And then is there any super interesting creative uses of AI recently that you're like, "Oh yeah, I should try this?" [00:48:55] S0: One of the most exciting ways that I use AI in work is I actually build sites all the time now. I don't know if you've tried building sites in Codex. [00:49:05] S1: I haven't talk about Sites.
00:49:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tara Seshan
[00:49:05] S1: I haven't talk about Sites. [00:49:06] S0: Sites is a really fun, amazing product. You can basically build a site, certainly in Work as a presentational artifact, but I also build sites for literally anything. I built a site for the team as a game where we all played a game together using a site because Sites have a database. I actually built a site because I went on a backpacking trip recently. I built a site of the route that tracked the elevation of everywhere we were going. Everyone on our trip inputted all their food. It was superfast and effective. Sites realized the dream of malleable personal software that Alan Kay flagged in the '60s of the true personal computer is one that has personal software. In some ways, Sites are the tangible way to make that possible. We had all once dreamed of making personal software, and certainly people with tools like Notion, et cetera, try with all these blocks to configure what that could be. But with the Site, it is literally a prompt. I literally with a prompt say, "Build me this exact tool that I need to get this thing done," and it just does it. They're shareable. They can auto update. You can use internal data to build a dashboard, for example, with lots of metrics. And rather than painstakingly laboring over some sort of slide deck, a site is just a way more dynamic surface for presentation. [00:50:33] S1: How do you use a site? Do you have to do anything special or you tell it, create a site? [00:50:33] S0: In Codex be like, "Create a site that- [00:50:35] S1: Create a site.