Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:58:19 · Tony Fadell
[00:58:19] S0: Storytelling, that's how we've passed information down or got people to commit to doing something. Stories are so who we are. We go to the movies for stories. We have books, we have all this stuff. And it's just so essential to who we are because we like to be taken on a journey. And hopefully when you're buying a product or licensing one or whatever it is, you're subscribing, you're taken on a journey that meets your expectations or is better than what the expectations were set, it's outsized that. And so Dave Chappelle is, when it comes to comedy and storytelling, the way he weaves it, he can weave a story for 20 minutes to get to the punchline and you're just in it, right? I just love his comedy as opposed to the punchline guys who are just, or excuse me, the short ones. It's something in our nature, human nature. We were told stories when we were a kid, we read the same or watched the same movies 100 times when we were kids. There's something about being taken on that journey that we love, and people love to be educated that way. Right. Your best college professors, high school teachers, whatever, they taught you why you should love certain math or certain physics or whatever and took you on a journey of why it mattered and then you're like, "Oh, now I get it." You can learn all the basics of how to do something, but that doesn't really tie it into something that's meaningful. And so when you tie it to something that's human, right, that's when it becomes and accessible for humans and it's relatable, that's when it goes and it can be for anything. And that's when great marketing, great sales happens. And great story telling through the product design, that's even better, right? Because it wasn't just perfuming this pig and you put some on this bad product and you say, "Oh yeah, try it. Oh, yeah." And you're like, "Oh, and then it doesn't meet the expectations." But when it sings from the depths of the product, like you were bringing up with the Nest Protect, the smoke detector and stuff. When we had all that and that you could feel the love and care, that's when people go, "Oh, I love this and I want more from that brand, or from that company, or that team." That's what they want. And so to get better at it, I've learned it because I watched my dad, he was in sales, right?