Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:21:26 · Ian Silber, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:21:26] S1: I think that's right. I do think that for... And again, this is not a blanket statement because I think if you're at a startup, that's very different. If I were starting a company right now, I would hire the best generalist people I could possibly think of, someone who I think could fluidly move between that. But maybe again, maybe that's always kind of been true. But at a bigger company, I do think that I've seen designers that are maybe incredible at designing, but could really use a product manager who can help them with hone both their thinking and then how they work and the operations of it all. So the point is I do just think that there are different... It's almost like taking the people out of it, I think that there are different hats that you need to wear to build great software. And I think that those continue to be important functions, I think. [00:22:24] S0: So this begs the question, do you think AI will ever be an extremely good product designer? And it's interesting to ask you this question because on the one hand you're like, "Oh yeah, ChatGPT is going to become incredible at everything." On the other hand, it's hard for a head of design to say, "Oh, no design's going to be done by AI." I'm curious to get your take. And it sounds crazy, but engineers never thought it would be able to write code the way it is now. So just thoughts on just how good AI will get.
00:22:24 · Lenny Rachitsky, Ian Silber
[00:22:24] S0: So this begs the question, do you think AI will ever be an extremely good product designer? And it's interesting to ask you this question because on the one hand you're like, "Oh yeah, ChatGPT is going to become incredible at everything." On the other hand, it's hard for a head of design to say, "Oh, no design's going to be done by AI." I'm curious to get your take. And it sounds crazy, but engineers never thought it would be able to write code the way it is now. So just thoughts on just how good AI will get. [00:22:53] S1: Maybe one way to put it is I think it already is an incredible product designer. It really is actually already great. The cool thing about it though is it's accessible to every single person. And it's a tool that anybody can use. I do think it's really good. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best visual designer or best at information hierarchy or typography or even user experience and interaction design. It's not necessarily the best at any of those. It's impossible to predict where things are going. And like I said earlier, how much has changed in three years? Of course they're going to continue to get better. But the way we think about it, and I really do believe this is we're building tools to enable people to be more creative, to do more, to build more. And so it is already a great designer, but it's at your fingertips to figure out how to use it and how to get the best out of it.
00:22:53 · Ian Silber, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:22:53] S1: Maybe one way to put it is I think it already is an incredible product designer. It really is actually already great. The cool thing about it though is it's accessible to every single person. And it's a tool that anybody can use. I do think it's really good. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best visual designer or best at information hierarchy or typography or even user experience and interaction design. It's not necessarily the best at any of those. It's impossible to predict where things are going. And like I said earlier, how much has changed in three years? Of course they're going to continue to get better. But the way we think about it, and I really do believe this is we're building tools to enable people to be more creative, to do more, to build more. And so it is already a great designer, but it's at your fingertips to figure out how to use it and how to get the best out of it. [00:23:55] S0: Where do you think human brains will continue to be most valuable as AI gets better at product design specifically? What are the remaining areas for us to be useful?
00:23:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Ian Silber
[00:23:55] S0: Where do you think human brains will continue to be most valuable as AI gets better at product design specifically? What are the remaining areas for us to be useful? [00:24:05] S1: Truly understanding what people need. I mean, the human feedback loop of watching people use something and understanding that, the inventing something new. And then of course there's just the pure human take like, "Oh, somebody made this, somebody had a point of view about this." I do think that will stand out more and more. And I think that that's an important thing for a designer to really hone is like, "What is my point of view? Who am I building this for and why?" And I don't know, I think as AI becomes better and better, for sure there will be an opportunity to always stand out and push, how can you push that even further? [00:25:01] S0: Yeah, that touches on a conversation I had with the PM of Codex. I asked him just why is AI not good at design? It's actually gotten better since that conversation, which was just a month or two ago. And he had a number of reasons for it. One is just part of great product design is doing something new. And so if it's trained on all the most interesting websites today, it's just like, okay, but that's not interesting anymore. And the other point he made is AI researchers aren't innately great at design, and so they may not understand exactly what it takes to train a model to be really good at this. Thoughts? What do you think it'll take to get AI to be much, much better at product design?
00:25:40 · Ian Silber
[00:25:40] S1: I mean, the new thing is interesting because I think that everything we're doing is trying to design something that hasn't existed before. If you look at great products that have come out in the last 10, 20 years or whatever, it's like all of a sudden, take the iPhone, we're designing for multitouch. And that opened up this whole new interaction paradigm. And there's no training data for that. You're really trying to understand this new thing. And then you had something like Instagram that was really embracing the fact that everybody had mobile phones. And then Snapchat I think is another good example of great design in that it was maybe people thought strange interaction design, but it completely flipped on its head the way people might want to communicate with each other. And to me, that is great design. It's truly understanding, the people have this problem or there's this unmet need and I'm going to build it in this unique way. So yeah, I do think that there's that sort of fresh, new kind of way. And then now with AI, it's like we're designing, like, how do you talk to AI with your voice? Or how do you use an agent to carry out tasks for you? It's like, yeah, there isn't a lot of precedent for this. And so I think that humans are able to do a really good job evaluating what good is or at least trying a bunch of things and learning along the way with people. And so I don't know. But again, all this stuff changes really quickly. It's hard to say, but I think there's a lot of reasons why having that human in the loop is going to be so important.
00:27:34 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:27:34] S0: And following that thread of the human in the loop. When you're hiring designers these days, what's trending up in what you look for? What you think is more and more important in the designers that will be successful today, especially at OpenAI? And what's trending down, if anything?