Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:51:46 · Tony Fadell
There's so many other aspects to writing code and delivering a product thing that you still need humans in the loop. And so when I think of product design, I think of software code with AI. And when you look at AI, and if it's not architecting things, and it's not segmenting things, and looking at each of those things, like I was saying, like there's software architects, and then there's software optimizers, and then there's just general coders, and then there's security reviews. And if you don't have those different mixture of experts around the code structuring it so that subsequent generations can get better and better and it just kind of devolves into this mass of things you don't know, you're getting short-term gain for very, very long-term laws. And that's called software debt, right, technical debt. And everybody hates technical debt. So it might be fixing something, but it most likely is giving more technical debt, especially when you're at the high level. So now how does that map to product management? So if you're a product manager and you type this in and you get some result, but you don't have a really good marketer, a really good marketing communications person, a really good salesperson, a real good channel salesperson, a really good architect, a really good manufacturing manager, all these different things in this thing that you're getting, you're not going to be able, you might be able to make the first one, but when you go to version five, six, how does that work? You're building on a really crusty foundation and people are like, "Well, my AI is going to be smarter." It's not proven to do that. What's proven is if you properly architect it and have Claude Code go into certain sub-segments, or have Claude help you build the architecture, you modify, refine it, lock it in and say, "Just work on these few things and these more limited-scoped things," yeah, you can make that work. And I think that's the way we have to consider how we use these tools in a product management capability as well: to just say it's all abstract away, it's all going to be better. And when you ask specific pointed questions and you want this thing fixed in your marketing thing or whatever, and then they're going to be like, "Well, the AI should just figure that out too." It's like, you have given up so much.
00:54:14 · Tony Fadell
To me, sure, you can write code, but there's going to be the difference between... It's like the difference between H&M and a luxury brand. You could go get certain things that look like that and copies that, but it doesn't last more than one washing or one season, and it's this, and you throw it away, and it's cheap and blah, blah, blah. Or you go to the luxury thing and you pay more and it's crafted, it's handcrafted, it's dah, dah, dah, dah, and you know it's going to be around for a while. There is this dichotomy of like fast and throwaway. So like it's called fast fashion. We got fast software. But software, if you're going to build a real company, can't be throwaway. Maybe it can, but I don't think it can be if you're really going to do this because you get just technical debt and you got to start over again. So you've got to really understand how you're using these tools, and a lot of these things that these AI coders can do, agent coders can do, can make you incredible prototypes, do more prototypes, do more of those things to help you get that informed gut to say, "We're going this direction," architect that in and then work on the sub-segments below it and all the expert systems, expert things that you need in each of those domains.
00:55:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[00:55:34] S1: Yeah. And I think what you may also be saying here, which I think is really, really important, is that because it's so easy to build, people can just build all these features and additions and the value accrues to build something awesome and the product mind becomes more important to help push this stuff from just a sloppy every feature, every checkbox to something awesome that people actually use. [00:55:59] S0: Right. Because at the end of the day, if you're building it for yourself, whatever, go have fun. But if you're going to build it and you want to sell it and you only need three key features to sell it to someone, like it's going to have to be boiled down. It's going to have to be figured out because you're still selling it to a human who needs to understand it. Now, do you think you could vibe code Flighty? [00:56:22] S1: Probably. [00:56:23] S0: Maybe now that Flighty exists, you could. [00:56:25] S1: Copy this. [00:56:26] S0: Like you could do version two of Flighty, maybe vibe coded because you say, look at Flighty. But the original Flighty, to me, that's luxury software, right? It was understood, how the pixels are done. So you got to remember, is it version one or is it version two, three, four? Because an opinion-based thing on highly innovative differentiated stuff, it doesn't have a model for that. There's not that stuff in there. You still need the version one to be done and maybe you can prototype with these things. So I just, I could go on for hours, but whatever, that's just one old guy's point of view.
00:56:26 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:56:26] S0: Like you could do version two of Flighty, maybe vibe coded because you say, look at Flighty. But the original Flighty, to me, that's luxury software, right? It was understood, how the pixels are done. So you got to remember, is it version one or is it version two, three, four? Because an opinion-based thing on highly innovative differentiated stuff, it doesn't have a model for that. There's not that stuff in there. You still need the version one to be done and maybe you can prototype with these things. So I just, I could go on for hours, but whatever, that's just one old guy's point of view. [00:57:03] S1: I think it's really important, this insight that as it becomes easier to build, the things that stand out are the things that are really well thought through, and great, and luxury almost as you described. [00:57:15] S0: And you can feel it, right? And you go, oh my God. And I'm like one of the biggest proponents of... I'm like telling, Flighty, Flighty, because all the people in my sphere, they're all flying all time. I'm like, "Have you tried it? Have you tried? So insane?" And then you get the word of mouth and things take off because there has been that level of care and craft to it. And yeah, maybe a lot of the sub-functions of Flighty could be built and whatever from Claude Code or whatever, but the whole thing and the architecture and everything, I don't think so. [00:57:50] S1: And if someone hasn't tried Flighty, clearly downloaded and play with it. [00:57:54] S0: Yeah. Yeah.
00:57:54 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:57:54] S0: Yeah. Yeah. [00:57:54] S1: I love that this is the example of an amazing product. That's a really cool thing- [00:57:58] S0: Yeah, and it's all software. It's all software. [00:58:00] S1: Yeah. Something along these lines, as people hear you talk, clearly you are an amazing storyteller and in your book, you often come back to the power of storytelling, the value of storytelling for product builders. I guess one is just: why is that so important, do you think? And two, is what's one tip you could give people to get better at storytelling?