Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:41:04 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:41:04] S1: Yeah. [00:41:05] S0: Just putting that out there. Okay. So something that I'm constantly thinking about along these lines is just the future of product PM engineering, how those roles shift over time based on the stuff we're talking about. How are you working together as a triad and where do you see these roles going? What's most going to change, do you think, across these three roles?
00:41:28 · Amol Avasare
[00:41:28] S1: This is something that we talk about and think about frequently, and the picture changes rapidly. So sometimes when things break, execution, like the bottlenecks break, historically in the past it's like, "Okay, now you need to hire more engineers, you need to hire more designers," et cetera. And it's more just a lifecycle thing of, where is the lifecycle of your team and that specific pod to identify where the bottleneck is? But now when things break, you need to still look at it, of, "Okay, is it the actual ratio or is there also underlying technological shifts that are also causing this to break?" And so that's an interesting thing. I think that smaller companies, if I'm at a 15 or 20-person company, I'm the only PM there working with some designers and engineers, I think in the smaller companies, you'll see probably the biggest blend, where the PM will be doing all sorts of ... They'll be designing, shipping, et cetera, and I think you just have extreme bifurcation. You know, at larger organizations, more scaled organizations, I think the jury is still very much out. You speak to people even internally here, and different people and different teams will have different views of, "Okay, how much are these roles coming together versus how much are these roles going to be separate?" I think that it's not to say even the PMs, number of PMs are shipping, and themselves shipping and pushing PRs, et cetera. But if I look at, okay, across what I'm seeing, I think that it's clear that while PMs and designers are getting more leverage from AI, engineering is getting the most leverage right now. I look at tools like Claude Code, and the amount of leverage engineers are getting from them is higher than, I think the leverage that designers and PMs are getting from them today. Now, this is rapidly also changing, but that to me is my view today. And so if you think about, okay, a default team, which is, say five engineers, one designer, one PM. With Claude Code, that five engineers is two to 3xed. And the PMs and designers have also increased, but now they're managing what is effectively a much larger group of engineers. And so even though the headcount and the org structure hasn't changed, you're now just dealing with a situation of maybe 15 to 20 engineers in the old world, one and a half to two PMs, and maybe one and a half to two designers.
00:44:00 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
And so we're seeing that that's putting a lot of strain on PM and design. And it's not everywhere. I look at teams like Claude Code and I think that, or because that product is so technical, it's probably just the right thing, where the PMs are all basically engineers themselves anyway. But we had a product, like a PM lead on site the other week, and we were all just talking about this where across the board we're feeling this, where PM and design is just squeezed. It's just absolutely squeezed. And we're like, "Is the right thing here, we just need to actually hire a ton more PMs?" And it could actually be where we land. On growth, how I think about it is, one, we are hiring a number of growth PMs. We desperately need people who are very, very good, and we are hiring. So if you are excited by what we're doing and you know growth, please feel free to apply. Would love to chat and- [00:44:58] S0: Maybe craft an amazing cold email to you.
00:45:00 · Amol Avasare
[00:45:00] S1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Feel free to craft that email. So that's one, is I think we are going to be hiring in a number of PMs. But then the second thing that we do is we very much hire product-minded engineers. I think this has always been the best thing to do in growth. You always want to have the engineers coming up with ideas, et cetera, especially people who can really step in as mini PMs if the PM is absent. And so we're basically more formally leveraging that right now because we are so stretched. So, the frame that we have is that if a project is two weeks of engineering time or less, then the engineer is on the hook to effectively be the PM for that. And so that means things like talking to security, talking to legal, talking to cross-functional stakeholders, and the engineer is very much driving that. The PM will get looped in and they'll advise if needed. And if something's wildly going off track, then they'll step in, but they're much more in an advisory capacity versus execution. If a project is more than two engineering weeks, then the default is that the PM should continue to be on the hook for making that go well. They'll still delegate more to eng, but they're squarely accountable. It's not fully clean-cut. It's like, use your head. If this is a one-week thing, but it's extremely controversial, the PM should probably still drive it. But that, I think is the approach that I expect more companies will start to do, which is just deputize the engineers to be mini PMs. Now, not everyone can do it. So the PMs, the engineers who are more product-minded, suddenly their value goes up significantly in order of magnitude. And then I think we will probably still be hiring a lot of PMs.
00:46:52 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:46:52] S0: There is so much interesting stuff I want to follow up on here. Okay, so one is this idea of two weeks, just briefly. I always joke as a PM, you can go on vacation and be away for a couple of weeks from your team and things are going to be all right. There's a momentum, there's a plan, people keep operating, and it feels like that's kind of this rule of thumb you use of just, "Okay, if it's a two-week project, you'll be all right without a PM. You can handle it." I love that those two connect. Okay. The other here is so interesting. So you're saying here that because engineers are so accelerated, and this all makes sense, PMs and design are kind of just like, "Holy." It feels like hard to keep up with this pace of engineering. And what you're saying is you need more and more PMs to keep up. That's one route, or it's engineers that can PM essentially, which is so funny. It's just like, okay, great news for the product managers until more of the PMey stuff can be done by AI. But that's a really interesting trend. I don't know, is there anything else there just like, "Oh wow, we actually may need more PMs"? The ratio of more PMs, fewer engineers might be the future.
00:47:52 · Amol Avasare
[00:47:52] S1: Yeah. I think it just really depends on the industry, the size of company. Any company where you're building something that's much more developer-focused, you're going to rely on the engineers a lot more. Earlier companies, you don't have as much of this cross-functional coordination, stakeholder alignment nonsense that you need all these PMs for, so you can get by with less. But then as a company scales, and if I think about, okay, now you have this ratio where maybe the one PM became two PMs from productivity, that the five engineers became 20 engineers, the one designer maybe became three designers. If you think about what is the best use of time for that PM, I think this is a really interesting thing, of how much should PMs be actually shipping things themselves versus everything else? I think in the world where you're limited on engineering, the PM should definitely be shipping things. I think in today's world, it's a good way to get an understanding of the tools, which is really important. So the PM should be shipping for that reason. But if I'm one PM or two PMs and there's 20 engineers, I think about what is the incremental value I can add with my time? And is it actually shipping the 21st PM feature or is it saying, "How am I getting a little bit better at guiding the team on what the right opportunities are?" And so that's where I think in this world, you may have all these engineers who are like mini PMs, and the better that happens, that's where I would love to be doing more of. But still, if you then get a really good PM who can come in and can improve that, the why and the what particularly by 5%, that is such a high leverage higher.