Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:39:52 · Evan Spiegel
[00:39:52] S1: Yeah, there's a couple really important things. First of all, we make all of our hiring decisions just based off portfolio. So that's really all we want to see. I really don't care where you've worked or your level of experience. In fact, most people join our design team right out of school, not from a big tech company or something like that. And really what I'm focused on is understanding the portfolio, and I want to see two things from the portfolio. The first is a really wide range, and that is the difference between art and design. So there are lots of people who have a very distinct style, right? They have a very distinct way of building things and creating things. That really is art, right? They're expressing themselves and their own personal point of view on the world, and it can be very beautiful, but it is not design. Design is really about empathizing with your customer, empathizing with your audience, your viewer, whoever it is, and then building something that really resonates with them. And that means you need to have an extraordinary amount of range. You've got to be able to build and create things that look totally different. So when I'm going through a portfolio, the first thing I'm looking for is like, are they building stuff that all looks the same or are they building things that look really different that have been responsive to different sets of needs? And that's how I know that they're a designer and not just an artist. And then the other thing I want to understand, and typically I interview every designer that joins our team, and what I want to understand is why and the story behind the work that they created. So typically what I'll do is just say, "Hey, pick something in your portfolio, anything you feel strongly about it." You could love it, hate it, I don't care. You just have to feel strongly about it. And just tell me the story of why you made it and what you learned through that process. And I think pretty quickly you can understand someone's process in terms of building something or inventing something, how do they go about it? And I'm really trying to make sure that we have people who have different ways of doing that on our team. One of the strengths of our design team has been that people come from lots of different backgrounds. They might come from 3D animation or they might come from electrical engineering.
00:41:52 · Evan Spiegel, Lenny Rachitsky
And that's a real strength to have folks who see the world differently and have totally different sets of skills. [00:41:58] S0: So as I was preparing for this chat, I talked to a bunch of people that worked at Snap over the years and I've integrated their ideas throughout already. But one that came up that I thought was interesting is I hear that you spent a lot of time developing young design talent and that's a big focus of yours. Can you just talk about how you develop young design talent?
00:42:17 · Evan Spiegel
[00:42:17] S1: Well, I think the number one way to develop young design talent is just help them make lots of stuff and get a lot of feedback from whether it's our customers or their teammates or myself directly. And so, one of the things that we do that's different at Snap is your first day that you join the design team, you present work. And it's really, really important that the first day that you show up on the team, you're making things. And that just sets the tone for the rest of your experience on the design team and growth on the design team because really that's what we're all about. And so I think folks who can get comfortable very quickly in that velocity of making things, that's where the ego sort of melts away because when you're creating a thousand new ideas, who cares that most of them are not great ideas? That's totally fine. What we want to get rid of is that sense of preciousness that people have around ideas where they feel like, "Oh, I've got this one really perfect, great idea, and if people don't love it, that means that I'm not a great designer." It's like, no, that's ridiculous. We all need to just create as many ideas as possible that will lead us to some really great ideas hopefully over time. And so I think for young designers, establishing that velocity of ideation very early on is really, really important. And then the other thing we do that I think is different, although I don't know, I've never really worked anywhere else, is we don't allow designers to get stuck on specific products or verticals for very long. We like to make sure people are rotating through different parts of the product to bring new ideas and fresh perspectives and also to avoid getting bored. If you're a great designer and you're stuck designing the chat experience for three years, I mean, how boring is that? It's really exciting, I think at Snap, to be able to work across all of these highly engaged product services. We have one of the largest maps in the world. We have the biggest augmented reality platform. These are really exciting opportunities for designers and it's important that we are rotating them across all of these different products so they're not getting stuck.
00:44:17 · Lenny Rachitsky, Evan Spiegel
[00:44:17] S0: I had Jenny Wen on the podcast. She was head of design for Claude and Cowork and she was like a director at Figma. And then she came to Anthropic and moved to just IC design again. And I asked her what's the hardest part of that move? And she said it's just all the crits that she has to deal with now are just so much criticism and constant feedback. And she forgot about that part of it. So it's interesting that's such a core part of the way you, like the thing that people have to learn essentially and get good at. [00:44:43] S1: Well, and one of the things that's so important about our design team and our design culture, one of the things that we try to do is there is no gate to showing me work every week. So there is no ... Any idea, it doesn't matter how good people think it is, how bad it is, you can bring it to that design meeting, get it on the list and share your work and your idea. And that is so important because I think to your point, sometimes people over-rely on this critique process and great ideas get filtered out. And so I think creating this culture on the team where you can bring anything to the design meeting, there's no filtering process, I think is just so important.
00:44:43 · Evan Spiegel, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:44:43] S1: Well, and one of the things that's so important about our design team and our design culture, one of the things that we try to do is there is no gate to showing me work every week. So there is no ... Any idea, it doesn't matter how good people think it is, how bad it is, you can bring it to that design meeting, get it on the list and share your work and your idea. And that is so important because I think to your point, sometimes people over-rely on this critique process and great ideas get filtered out. And so I think creating this culture on the team where you can bring anything to the design meeting, there's no filtering process, I think is just so important. [00:45:20] S0: You mentioned AI, how designers are shipping code. I have a friend who works at a big tech company and you just said all the design team, they're required to ship like, I don't know, 10 PRs a month or something like that or a quarter, which is such a new world. I guess one is just like, how do you think about designers shipping code? Is that like just do it if you can or is there a requirement sort of thing? And broadly, I'm just curious how AI is changing the way your team operates. What are just a few things that have been impactful in how your team operates that are AI driven?
00:45:52 · Evan Spiegel
[00:45:52] S1: Taking a step back, it's definitely not a requirement to ship code on the design team, but I think people are so passionate and curious about learning new things. I mean, one of the things we've always tried to do on the design team is just figure it out. I remember in the early days of some of the 3D graphic stuff that we were trying to do, one of our team members had never done 3D graphics before. And they're like, "Okay, let's just figure it out." So they took some online tutorials and boom, we were off to the races. So I think the design team has always been really flexible in terms of their curiosity, learning new things. And so I don't think you have to push people or create a requirement or something like that for folks to want to adopt new tools and want to ship code. I think the big question now that everyone and anyone thinks they can submit a PR is like how we don't break things at a billion or nearly a billion user scale, right? That's really important. So I think what we've really tried to do is also develop AI tools and guardrails to make it easier for more people to participate and submit code, but also reduce the likelihood that we're going to have some sort of bug. So we've got automated code review now. We've, I think automatically detected like close to 10,000 bugs at this point probably. We have a system at Snap where on the internal version of the app, you can shake to report your problem and agents now debug exactly what happened, what went wrong and can actually suggest a fix. And I think in pretty short order it'll be implementing the fix as well, which is pretty crazy. So I think taking a step back, there's so much excitement around the way that AI is going to change the way that companies work. Obviously software companies in particular, like ours, I think are on the cutting edge of the way that AI is changing how things get built and what gets done. We really wanted to bring some order to that chaos. And so the way that we did that was really by starting with the jobs to be done for our community and our advertisers. So getting really, really basic and straightforward on, okay, for Snap-chatters, our jobs to be done, it's as simple as like get people to download the app, get them to add their close friends, get them to, I don't know, use lenses, something like that. On the advertiser front, right?