Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:48:04 · Evan Spiegel, Lenny Rachitsky
It could be bringing people into the ad platform, configuring their campaign, et cetera. And so by listing out all these jobs to be done, really for the community journey and for advertisers as well, it became very clear where we could use agents, where we needed to be very focused in terms of building cross-functional teams around those jobs supported by AI tools. And it's also given us, I think, a really helpful mechanism to track our progress against the business outcomes for each of those jobs. So I think for us trying to, while I think in this moment of time, you certainly want to have a thousand flowers bloom and people are building agents and experimenting, I think at the same time, making sure that we stay focused on what matters to our community, what matters to advertisers is really, really important. [00:48:51] S0: Okay. I want to take a step back and think about, just kind of reflect back. It's been 15 years since you've been working on Snap. You launched about 15 years ago. I'm curious just what are some of the maybe biggest lessons, maybe the hardest lessons you've learned over the past 15 years, things that you're like, "Oh, I didn't realize this as I was starting this company."
00:48:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Evan Spiegel
[00:48:51] S0: Okay. I want to take a step back and think about, just kind of reflect back. It's been 15 years since you've been working on Snap. You launched about 15 years ago. I'm curious just what are some of the maybe biggest lessons, maybe the hardest lessons you've learned over the past 15 years, things that you're like, "Oh, I didn't realize this as I was starting this company." [00:49:09] S1: Yeah, I think it's hard to comprehend how much the job changes over time. I mean, it's really quite extraordinary to go from my job in the early days with Bobby and I was helping design the product, but I was also answering customer support emails. I was trying to get our legal filing sorted out. I was trying to raise money. As the company grows and things evolve, so much more of the job is about leadership, about making sure you're really developing people, selecting the right people to be on the team, developing the culture, doing that really, really seriously. And in some ways, creating a structure that can enforce that to have a cohesive culture and a vision around the company, it becomes about strategy, managing through enormous change like what we're seeing with artificial intelligence today, but also several years ago, managing through the pandemic or managing through rebuilding our advertising platform as the landscape changed. So the job has just changed so dramatically. And I think that's part of what's so energizing about it, what I enjoy so much about it, but it's also something I never in a million years could have anticipated when we were first getting started.
00:49:09 · Evan Spiegel, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:49:09] S1: Yeah, I think it's hard to comprehend how much the job changes over time. I mean, it's really quite extraordinary to go from my job in the early days with Bobby and I was helping design the product, but I was also answering customer support emails. I was trying to get our legal filing sorted out. I was trying to raise money. As the company grows and things evolve, so much more of the job is about leadership, about making sure you're really developing people, selecting the right people to be on the team, developing the culture, doing that really, really seriously. And in some ways, creating a structure that can enforce that to have a cohesive culture and a vision around the company, it becomes about strategy, managing through enormous change like what we're seeing with artificial intelligence today, but also several years ago, managing through the pandemic or managing through rebuilding our advertising platform as the landscape changed. So the job has just changed so dramatically. And I think that's part of what's so energizing about it, what I enjoy so much about it, but it's also something I never in a million years could have anticipated when we were first getting started. [00:50:26] S0: How have you most changed and I guess evolved over that course? What's a big area that you've improved in?