Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:15:02 · Amol Avasare
And so you're like, if someone comes to you with conviction and is like, "I have a really good hypothesis around this," and you're like, "I don't love it, but you can run the test and see what impact it has." And if it's a high level of cringe or ick, then I want to see a high level of return for the result for that. I kind of think about everything and like, is it in one or is it in two? And for every company, that one and two is different. I think for us, AI safety is very much in one. I think that it's like, "Yeah, that's why we exist. Yeah, it's fine. We're just not going to do this thing." I think then, there's other things that fall into two, where you're like, heightened sensitivity, but we can try it and see what happens. I think zooming out though, Lenny, one of the biggest mistakes I feel like I see growth teams make, and particularly just hardcore growth practitioners, is just trying to squeeze every last dollar. I think this is like a general principle also in life. If you're a founder raising money, you're just trying to squeeze that last dollar. You don't want to do that because you want people to come back next time as well, is my view. And I think in growth, I think it's really important that you just need to be okay leaving money on the table. And that's a core principle for us as a growth team, where we are very comfortable for going metric impact in order to prioritize safety, in order to protect our brand, in order to hold a high quality bar and to maintain a great user experience. And if you look beyond the short term and like, "Okay, what are the numbers for this quarter?" And you zoom out and you think about what are the very best products out there, you realize this is how they all operate. And that's actually the thing that's going to drive more growth long-term as well. And so I think that actually ties back to safety, where as the risks get higher and the stakes get higher, I think the fact that we are taking a stance and safety is critical to what we do, is actually going to become a significant, it's going to be a significant competitive advantage for us that I think is going to help us in the long run.
01:17:19 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:17:19] S0: Yeah. And as you share all this, clearly it's working. Anthropic is killing it. So I love when someone doing something, someone approaching the problem that way, it actually works out. It's the same way I think about with my newsletter. There's so much more I can do to grow it. My philosophy is just focus on creating good content, nothing else. All these micro optimizations are not going to matter in the end. It'll grow through people sharing it if it's useful to them. And a very small scale, I have similar philosophy. One of the things that people are probably thinking about as we talk, we joke about AI replacing parts of jobs here and there. It is pretty scary to a lot of people, just like, "What is the future of my job? Will I have a job? How do I stay relevant in this future?" So there's a couple of questions here. One is just like, for folks that want to thrive in this approaching AI future, as a PM, as a growth person, do you have any advice, things that they should be doing right now?
01:18:19 · Amol Avasare
[01:18:19] S1: To me, a couple of things come up. One thing that everyone says, is use the tools, you need to be on top of the tools. I think you need to be using Claude Code, you need to be using Cowork and understanding just each model release. What is the new things you can do with this? How can you apply this to your job? It'll work well in some things, it'll work terribly in other things. And then the model launched later, it's like, "Oh shit, that other thing worked." But if you didn't go back to try it, you would not have known. And now, many months have passed and you didn't know that that was possible. And so I think that being on top of the tools is really important, both for improving your own productivity, but also for getting product sense around AI products, which I think is just going to become increasingly important. I think then, zooming out beyond that, I look at it as like, just leaning into where you'll have a competitive advantage and an unfair advantage. And so to me, there are some people, some PMs who are really good at like, craft, for example. And there's others who you'll throw them into a situation with all these stakeholders who have all these strong opinions and there's no way they're going to mediate this. And they come out and it's like, everyone's swimming in the right direction. And so if you think about like, what is the major skillset that you have where you spike that can be tied to delivering, driving impact for a company in a product role, I would just double down on that and almost forget the weaknesses. Just what can you do to become the best person at that thing, because that's very, very valuable. And I think that ties to the notion of just leaning into being interdisciplinary. So going back to some of what we mentioned earlier on where it's like, "Okay, in this world of engineers are mini PMs, that the engineer who is highly product-minded is a unicorn, is an absolute unicorn." I think the same thing is true for PMs, where it's like, "Okay, now, in this ratio, if the designer's really stretched and you're a PM who can design, you are also a unicorn now." The chances of a company letting you go has gone down dramatically because you are now just so much more useful. And so I think that is just really, really important. I think if I look at what's benefited me, it's probably a version of this.
01:20:36 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
I think that for me, I came from a founder background. So the mix of the founder background, the finance. I was an investment banker, so the finance background and numbers. And then sales, I almost became an account exec, instead of going into product. I was right on the edge of, "Should I go into sales or product?" And I think a combination of those, along with growth is probably what's led to like, there are certain areas and situations where I can just have outsized impact to other people. And so, understanding what that is for you is really important. I look at our financial services product. We've launched Claude for Sheets, Claude for Excel- [01:21:15] S0: They kind of like, tanked the market, by the way. Everyone went crazy.
01:21:15 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[01:21:15] S0: They kind of like, tanked the market, by the way. Everyone went crazy. [01:21:18] S1: I know. But the guy running that, Nick Lin, he came from investment banking, he came from private equity, and he just has such a competitive advantage where he is building that product and he's like, "I know this, I know this." He's built for this. And so I think just understanding what are those interdisciplinary areas you can lean into, to make yourself more just higher impact is really important. And then the last one is just being adaptable. Anyone who is trying to just keep applying old playbooks, I think you're going to make life a lot harder for yourself. So one of the biggest things you come into Anthropic, is you need to understand that probably 50, 60, 70% of how you operate in the past, just throw it out the door. It's not going to be relevant. And if you try to stick to that, you're going to have a lot of friction and it's not going to be helpful. So just being adaptable and understanding, "Okay, the job's changed this way, I'm going to go that way," is I think like, it's so, so important.
01:22:17 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:22:17] S0: That is awesome advice. It matches a lot of what Jenny shared when she came on the podcast, the design leader on Claude and Cowork and all these things, of just the idea of going deep, becoming the best or one of the best at a very specific thing, and that not every company will need and you don't need all 10, but just going deep on something. I forget how she described it. Marc Andreessen said the same thing. I think we called it a sideways E, instead of just T-shaped of one thing. If you could have a couple of things you're really, really good at, there's a lot of power to that. Oh, man. Okay. Before I get into something that I think will blow a lot of people's minds about how we actually met and kind of a big part of your journey, let me just ask you this. Is there anything else about Anthropic that might be worth sharing, might be worth talking about?