Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:32:08 · Ian Silber, Lenny Rachitsky
[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. [00:32:54] S0: Just to follow that thread, because that feels like a pretty big change in the design world. There used to be this, we had a podcast with, she was head of native design Claude Code, Jenny Wen, and she talked about this and I think it blew a lot of people's minds. There's been this traditional design process. Prototype, mock, test, use research, iterate. Okay, cool. Ready for engineering, build it, iterate, ship it. And now there's just no time for that. And so the role in her eyes is just move to big picture planning and just steering people in a good direction. Does that resonate? How much that has changed in the world of a designer?
00:33:28 · Ian Silber
[00:33:28] S1: I think that 100% we do work that way. It depends. I think for us, it depends on what stage you're at in the process or maybe how far along the product is. There are certain features for ChatGPT where we really obsess and we really spend a lot of time. We try a hundred things and we throw out 99 and we finally ship one. Or the composer is changing every single day and we try many things and we throw them out. And you could take that for many different things within ChatGPT. And then there are other things like Codex where, I don't know, I mean a super app is a good example where we definitely are just trying stuff really quick. I think that we really embrace building in public, which is a different way of working. But I think that when you get comfortable with it is actually really gratifying or satisfying because you can try stuff and get instant feedback both internally and externally. But yeah, I mean it is moving really fast. And I think it just depends. Like I said, certain things we really sweat the details and we try and we do test, we A/B test, we'll do user research and we kind of iterate and evolve a lot. And then other things, we take big swings and then we learn quickly. But yeah, I don't know. I think the biggest thing is embracing that the technology might change in a month and maybe a certain interaction or setting or whatever that you needed doesn't need to exist or now a new one does need to exist or a new capability is there or the latency profile has changed such that you can rethink this or whatever. All these capabilities are changing or the intelligence has changed. And so you have to be just really quick on your feet and maybe not be so precious about it until it's at the point where, okay, this is kind of hardened. We don't think that this is necessarily going to change tomorrow because of the technology, so let's make this the best it can possibly be. We're thinking a lot about how we should evolve. Really think about ChatGPT becoming deeply embedded in your personal life and how should the app feel? That's something that we're not going to necessarily design and ship overnight and just put it out there. We're really thinking about that and we're trying a bunch of different ideas and we're putting it up on a whiteboard or we're doing some design in Figma. We're prototyping it.
00:36:23 · Ian Silber, Lenny Rachitsky
We're probably going to dog food a bunch of different ideas long before we ever ship something. But that's a bigger project. And then there's other things where we're like, idea to ship in four hours. [00:36:38] S0: This all makes sense. Essentially what I'm hearing is you pick your battles and you focus the design effort on the things that will be durable and not change.