Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:27:50 · Ian Silber
[00:27:50] S1: This might be a luxury of having a slightly larger team, but if you're at our scale, but even at a startup or a smaller company, I think this would still be true. I really believe in hiring a well-rounded team that has many different strengths. So I think it's important to have the right ratio of generalists that can do everything. But we also hire incredible visual designers or we have a really amazing brand team that helps us with the expression of our brand both out and in the product or great prototypers. And so I think that rounding that out or great product thinkers that are a little bit more strategic or people that are really obsessed over the very cutting edge of where these things are going. And I haven't found that one designer necessarily checks every single one of those boxes. I think people just naturally are drawn to certain things. And I think embracing that and when you build a team is actually, if you have the luxury of doing that, is really valuable. Okay, so that's a broad statement. But then as far as what we look for, we do definitely... I always tell candidates, we do not expect you to have a background in AI because again, this is evolving so quickly, but we definitely expect high curiosity about it and high aptitude to jumping in and learning how you're going to use this in your process, how it works. And not just how you use it in your process, but how, especially for us, how you're going to create tools to enable more people to use it. And so it's more about the curiosity, I think, is something that we really push on or look for. And then definitely prototyping. Prototyping is something I've always valued in my career, but I just think that it's become more and more accessible. And so that's something that I think really does stand out usually when we talk to candidates. And then I do think that just having a point of view on where these things are going or just any of the tools that people have worked on and really thinking that strategic thinking. I guess last one on this is systems thinking is becoming more and more important. And especially as you're... In our world, it's interesting because we're building the super intelligence that has all these different capabilities. And we need to think more about the underlying primitives that we can build that can kind of build on top of each other.
00:30:38 · Ian Silber, Lenny Rachitsky
This is something that I think Notion did really well early on was like, "We're going to build these building blocks and then everything kind of is composable." I think that's becoming really important too, as you think about like, well, we don't want to build all these sort of one-off siloed experiences. We want to be able to build and ship systems that can build on top of each other so that when someone goes and uses our product, it feels like one cohesive, simple thing. And the model can reason about how we can pull all these things together. So that idea of really understanding the system and thinking about that is becoming even more important, especially because it's kind of complex of all the things that it could possibly do. [00:31:31] S0: This is the fifth podcast in a row I've done where systems thinking has come up as- [00:31:36] S1: Interesting. [00:31:36] S0: ... a skill that people are more and more looking for. And it's so funny. I need a bingo card for systems thinking, but it makes so much sense. And I think it especially makes sense from the designer perspective. If we come back to just my take on why designers are kind of frustrated and stressed right now is just there's less time to do design, the traditional design process. Things are just moving. Engineers are shipping 5,000 PRs a day. And so to your point, this idea of building blocks and design system language and just a platform for people to build on feels incredibly important.
00:31:36 · Lenny Rachitsky, Ian Silber
[00:31:36] S0: ... a skill that people are more and more looking for. And it's so funny. I need a bingo card for systems thinking, but it makes so much sense. And I think it especially makes sense from the designer perspective. If we come back to just my take on why designers are kind of frustrated and stressed right now is just there's less time to do design, the traditional design process. Things are just moving. Engineers are shipping 5,000 PRs a day. And so to your point, this idea of building blocks and design system language and just a platform for people to build on feels incredibly important. [00:32:08] S1: Totally. It's very hard, but yeah, it's funny. We've had these conversations where I'm like, "Just do less." My encouragement has been do less. Don't design it if you don't have to, maybe there's already an existing system or component or something that we can build on top of, or maybe we don't even need this feature. We actually just need to extend an existing feature. I think that's an important thing. And part of that is thinking outside of the bounds of what you're working on and thinking across everything I think is becoming much more important. And the speed for sure I think is a reason why that's so important right now.