Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:43:36 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[00:43:36] S1: Navigator. [00:43:37] S0: And then all of a sudden it evaporated like, "Well, what do I use the net for? I got the tool to get onto it, but what do I use it for daily." And it had to develop. And so OpenAI is now shifting like, "Oh, we got to get product teams and we got to start about product marketing." So to me, it's marketing. But if you are already thinking about the marketing, you're already going to start thinking about the product. And that's the thing is when you're just thinking about the product, and it was really just a technology demo that went viral. And they're like, "Oh yeah." And they still keep winning on that. They never put product in until it was too late. And now Anthropic's where they are and valued more and higher revenue and all that other stuff. So even if it's a software only product, yes, there's lots of hardware and servers and all the other stuff. You need to think holistically and you need to think about the entire customer journey, the marketing, the sales pieces, the distribution pieces, the product definition piece, the messaging, the target markets, early on. You can't leave it till later and and then back calculate it. And that's why I say you should really make the press release before you more or less start the project. [00:44:53] S1: Yeah. There's a whole chapter on that. Amazon's also very famous for that, this whole book on Working Backwards that goes really deep on this approach.
00:44:53 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[00:44:53] S1: Yeah. There's a whole chapter on that. Amazon's also very famous for that, this whole book on Working Backwards that goes really deep on this approach. [00:45:01] S0: But the weird thing is it's working backwards. See, the thing saying working backwards, would a movie be created that way? Is it called working backwards when you say, "I'm going to make a script, and I'm making the treatment, and I'm going to really know what it is. I know what my characters are and how I do character development." Is that really working backwards? It sounds like it's backwards. It's, no, that's the way you do it. It's just because it's so technology led and technologist, and this is what I thought when I was 20, I was like, "Yeah, now it sounds backwards." It's actually, no, that's actually insane. It's not working backwards. It's just an insane way of working. Come on, let's really think through this. [00:45:39] S1: It says so much that you as one of the, I don't know, most successful insightful builders are so into marketing. I think that's a really important takeaway for people, just how obsessed you are with that piece of building that I think a lot of builders don't think about at all.
00:45:55 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:45:55] S0: Well, when you live in that world and you live in the customer... Because you're coming from a customer point of view. So you have to see the lens. And the customer only sees what they see through the lens of marketing and sales. And so you have to be in their shoes and you go, "Okay, when I do the press release, I can only have three or four key features." After that, it becomes gobbledygook for a customer. So you're like, "Okay, what are those three or four things? Okay, what is that? That's what we're going to focus on." And so no, we're not going to add five more features. That's not going to make it sell better. Or, "Oh no, we're going to cut these two features and ship it." It's like, "Well, wait a second, we cut out two of our three key tentpole features. How are we going to sell that anymore?" So it's a holistic design. It's not [inaudible 00:46:41]. Because we think the technology's in service of the customer, not we're going to jam the technology down the customer's throat, and they're going to figure out how to use it. There's too much noise that you've got to make it frictionless, and you got to fit it in their world and see from their point of view go, "Oh, that's why I need it. " General Magic was the perfect story for that. I don't know, your viewers should definitely watch the movie General Magic because- [00:47:05] S1: Absolutely. [00:47:06] S0: ... we made the iPhone 15 years too early and that was a classic case where we were just making the things that were really cool, but nobody needed it.
00:47:06 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:47:06] S0: ... we made the iPhone 15 years too early and that was a classic case where we were just making the things that were really cool, but nobody needed it. [00:47:14] S1: Yeah, that documentary's incredible. It's such a very young version of you. [00:47:19] S0: Yeah, very different and probably people won't recognize me. [00:47:22] S1: Yeah. You have a whole chapter about just not overworking in your career based on that experience. [00:47:27] S0: Which General Magic was for me. Yeah.
00:47:30 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:49:20 · Tony Fadell
[00:49:20] S0: Well, the discipline of product management sits between all of these functional roles, okay, whether that's marketing, sales, distribution, sometimes manufacturing, depends on what the product is, engineering obviously, and customer support. So when you sit between all of these things, maybe those roles shift or change, especially depending on what it is you're building and that kind of thing. But you have to interpret what's going on between all of them and stitch them all together to make this thing sing. And what we're saying is, "Oh, I can just, today in the AI world, I can just make a prompt and all of a sudden it gets spit out." And you don't know what all those little functions are. If you are not aware of each of those functions, even in an AI world of what those things are, they are very clear definitions of certain points of view for the customer and you have to consider them. And to say that they're going to get washed away and an AI is going to come up with it, it reminds me a lot of how software coding is getting done with something like Claude today. I don't know, maybe it was a month ago when the Claude source code leaked, right? Claude source code leaked. And everybody's like, "Oh my God, it leaked." And at the time, and maybe they changed it, maybe they didn't, but at the time Dario was saying, " 90 to 100% of all our codes written by Claude, and we just monitor it and watch it." And we're like, "Oh, well, that's really interesting." And then the code leaks. And then if you looked at the code, anybody who looked at the code who's a real software architect and engineer threw up, they were like, "It made what?" They're like, "This stuff is brittle." Engineers were looking at like, this should be layered in four or five, actually 12 or 15 different sub functions. This is the main loop of Anthropic's Claude. The main loop, not just something off in the... This is the main loop. And people are like, "How can you do this? This looks brittle. It's unreadable." And they're like, "Well, the AI knows it." But when you think about it and you have to maintain it, you can have an agent make code for you and it could work and it could test, but is it secure? Is it maintainable? If there's something going wrong, can you roll things back and understand what's going on?