Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:50:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Evan Spiegel
[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? [00:50:33] S1: One of the big focus areas for me was learning how to communicate more effectively, both to our team, but also here on a podcast or with the world, I mean, so much of the job is about becoming a great communicator. I remember I had the opportunity to meet President Clinton at one point in the early days of the company and he was like, "It's very interesting, being president is really being explainer in chief and your job is actually to just explain stuff to people and help them make sense of the world and the company and their role in it." And I always thought that was really interesting. And I go back to that a lot. So much of my job is to explain things to our company and to our shareholders, to the world in ways that really make sense and can inspire folks and help us to all move in the right direction. So I think communication just becomes such a core skill. And I think in the early days, I was unnecessarily dismissive of the really important role of communication. [00:51:31] S0: For founders that are hearing this and they're like, "Okay, I'm going to work on this," What most helped you level up in this space? Is it like coaches? Is it people around you? Is it just doing it?
00:51:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Evan Spiegel
[00:51:31] S0: For founders that are hearing this and they're like, "Okay, I'm going to work on this," What most helped you level up in this space? Is it like coaches? Is it people around you? Is it just doing it? [00:51:41] S1: Just doing it is really the only way. And I remember that was really the advice one of our board members gave to me because I was so reluctant. I didn't want to do an all hands. I didn't want to do Q&A. In the early days of the company, I was like, "I'll just send an email." And he's like, "What are you doing?" He's like, "Too bad, Evan. This is your job." And I think that was really, really good advice. And so literally I was like, "Okay, fine. This is a core part of my job and what I need to learn how to do. I'm going to learn to love it. I want to love it. I want to get up there and get in front of our company and really enjoy answering all these really tough questions and digging into the business with our team." And now I really do. I've learned to really enjoy that dialogue with our team. And I learned so much from the questions that folks ask. And I love that openness. I think it's just such an important part of our company and who we are.