Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:49:45 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[00:49:45] S0: This is such an interesting insight you're making. It's so counter to how a lot of people are thinking PM is evolving. What I'm hearing here is, because PMs are so behind, because engineers are just getting so much done, there's many people here, "Okay, you need to be prototyping, you need to be shipping PRs as a PM." What you're saying, which I completely agree with, is your time is much better spent helping PM basically, and helping the engineers become better PMs themselves. And the leverage there is a lot higher than you spending time coding, shipping PRs in most cases. [00:50:17] S1: I think that's true in certain circumstances. I think that as a smaller company, I don't know that that's the case. In a smaller company where it's all hands on deck, I think you probably need to be shipping. I think if you're in a company where budgets are very tight, and engineers are very tight, and you're not able to just hire because money's unlimited, then you need to do what is needed to accelerate the impact your team's going to have. Right? So there's going to be a number of cases, where as a PM, the right thing to do is to be like, "Screw it. I'm shipping and I'm going it the whole way." But I'm talking here more about the larger companies, more scaled businesses. Yeah, if you have 20 engineers, is it the highest use leverage of your time to ship an extra feature, or figure out how do I up-level everything that we're doing, get the user insights better, et cetera?
00:50:17 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:50:17] S1: I think that's true in certain circumstances. I think that as a smaller company, I don't know that that's the case. In a smaller company where it's all hands on deck, I think you probably need to be shipping. I think if you're in a company where budgets are very tight, and engineers are very tight, and you're not able to just hire because money's unlimited, then you need to do what is needed to accelerate the impact your team's going to have. Right? So there's going to be a number of cases, where as a PM, the right thing to do is to be like, "Screw it. I'm shipping and I'm going it the whole way." But I'm talking here more about the larger companies, more scaled businesses. Yeah, if you have 20 engineers, is it the highest use leverage of your time to ship an extra feature, or figure out how do I up-level everything that we're doing, get the user insights better, et cetera? [00:51:14] S0: Yeah. And I think there's also an element of shipping to learn, building a prototype so that you can have a better opinion. A lot of people talk about just, "I'm just going to try three things, see how it goes and that'll help inform the roadmap." This is now the PRD, is look at it instead of talking about it. So there's a lot of value there still.
00:51:14 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[00:51:14] S0: Yeah. And I think there's also an element of shipping to learn, building a prototype so that you can have a better opinion. A lot of people talk about just, "I'm just going to try three things, see how it goes and that'll help inform the roadmap." This is now the PRD, is look at it instead of talking about it. So there's a lot of value there still. [00:51:29] S1: That's very true. I think that's a great point. So even for me now where we've got number of PMs, we've got many engineers, there are certain times when I'm like, "I want to articulate the idea I have in my head." It's just better for me to prototype it and show it. Right? So I think that is really important. And then we are very scrappy. So we're a big company by name, valuation, but we're extremely scrappy, and just the focus internally is just minimize bureaucracy and just go. And so probably 70%, maybe 60, 70, 80% of what we ship does not have a PRD. I'm averse to PRDs. I think I just hate documentation. I'm just like, "Go, go, go. Just cut the blockers." 20, 30% of stuff where it's like, it's important, it's really important to get right. The documentation should be really good and that people should spend a lot of time on it. But by and large, I think PRDs are just outdated at this point, and you can just kick things off with a good team without needing to do that sort of thing.
00:51:29 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:51:29] S1: That's very true. I think that's a great point. So even for me now where we've got number of PMs, we've got many engineers, there are certain times when I'm like, "I want to articulate the idea I have in my head." It's just better for me to prototype it and show it. Right? So I think that is really important. And then we are very scrappy. So we're a big company by name, valuation, but we're extremely scrappy, and just the focus internally is just minimize bureaucracy and just go. And so probably 70%, maybe 60, 70, 80% of what we ship does not have a PRD. I'm averse to PRDs. I think I just hate documentation. I'm just like, "Go, go, go. Just cut the blockers." 20, 30% of stuff where it's like, it's important, it's really important to get right. The documentation should be really good and that people should spend a lot of time on it. But by and large, I think PRDs are just outdated at this point, and you can just kick things off with a good team without needing to do that sort of thing. [00:52:34] S0: Say more about that. What do you do to help make sure, because people can build so fast, or spend a lot of time going in the wrong direction, ship things that are not what you're asking? How do you kick off a project and clarify, "Here's what we're doing"? Is it just a conversation or is there anything beyond that?