Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:49:26 · Ian Silber
[00:49:26] S1: I mean, so many things. I think the first one is recognizing that we're really early and instead... I actually was pretty intimidated coming to OpenAI, if I'm being honest. I remember interviewing. Oh no, I got to... GPT-4 had recently come out and GPT. I was like, "What is all this stuff?" I was using it and I was using the stuff, but I didn't feel like I had a true understanding of it. And to be honest, I still have so much to learn. So that idea of you are early, we're figuring this out. That I think I would want to hear. And the other thing that I found, and for me, this is more of a personal thing, it's less about AI or anything, but I stepped into a really different role most of my career. I definitely managed before, but never at a scale that's growing so fast and then at a company that is so different that... the role was just every day was something new. And for a long time I felt like I'm kind of bad at this or I don't know what I'm doing. And then I went and talked to friends that had led really large design teams or were in a similar transition as me and they all felt exactly the same or the problems that I had were not unique. And so this is, I guess, more personal advice that it's like, I think at any stage of your career, there's that feeling of imposter syndrome and what am I doing? I don't know how to do this. Finding people you can talk to that are going through the similar things, you'll find that there's usually a lot of shared challenges and struggles and having that, whether it's a mentor or just a buddy that is impartial, out of it, was really helpful to me. And finding that community I think has been helpful. So yeah, so that and then understanding that this is all so new and evolving really quickly.
00:51:37 · Lenny Rachitsky, Ian Silber
[00:51:37] S0: That is extremely helpful to hear. Elena Verna had this really great post. I don't know if you know her. She's head of growth at Lovable right now. She had this great post called Stop the AI Confidence Theater, where she just kind of is like all these people just keep posting all these things they've done with AI and all the ways it's changed their life and it's just the killing it, figure it all out. And really it's very few people, very few of these things are actually that great and working and it's just like, stop. Stop pretending like this is actually, you figured it all out. [00:52:05] S1: I tghink it's much better to be humble about it and be like, wow, yeah, I don't know. This changing quickly and I'm just going to embrace it and see where it goes. [00:52:13] S0: Yeah. And that connects to what you said was a core component of people that are doing well right now. People that are curious and just kind of poking around and trying to try these things and try them again because maybe it didn't work now. It didn't work before, now it works now. [00:52:25] S1: 100%. Yeah. Every model, every new feature, it's like the people that are poking around at those edges I've found are just having such a blast doing it. [00:52:39] S0: And this connects to something else Kevin Weil, former CPO at OpenAI said on the podcast, which has always stuck with me, which is the model we have today is the worst the model will ever be. [00:52:48] S1: Exactly. I mean that goes back to when we... Yeah, I mean a new model comes out, what, every week? [00:52:59] S0: Every day.
00:52:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Ian Silber
[00:52:59] S0: Every day. [00:53:00] S1: I don't know, every day? If you count all the labs and everything, it's changing so quickly and every one gets better. And I don't know. Yeah, I always try to remind myself. It must be what, I don't know, building or designing in early days of computers when componentry was really evolving really quickly and there were these drastic step changes and you would hit these limitations and all of a sudden those limitations were gone. I think it's the same. It's like these things just change and what was totally broken yesterday now actually just kind of works. [00:53:41] S0: So maybe to start to close out the conversation, say a designer is listening to this and they're in that bucket of overwhelmed, anxious, struggling, stressed, feeling uncertain about their future. What's one suggestion you have for them to help them move out of that state and into a better place?
00:53:41 · Lenny Rachitsky, Ian Silber
[00:53:41] S0: So maybe to start to close out the conversation, say a designer is listening to this and they're in that bucket of overwhelmed, anxious, struggling, stressed, feeling uncertain about their future. What's one suggestion you have for them to help them move out of that state and into a better place? [00:53:59] S1: Just recognizing that it's a totally rational feeling and it's a great time to just try to explore and see, what if I tried working... What if I tried rethinking about the tooling? Or, what if I just embraced like, "Oh, maybe I should prototype more. Let me try using these tools." But again, recognizing that maybe it helps to hear that I think that we're all still so early and it's still changing and just embracing that. Just have fun with it and see where it goes. And I think maybe another thing I would say is really try to focus on the output, the outcome. At the end of the day, we're not here to build tool processes. We're not here to build or tokenmax or something like that. We're here to make great software that people love or great products or whatever it is you do. But that's the thing that really matters. And if you focus on that, I think that you'll hopefully find that these tools can help you do that, but you still have a huge role in that as the person that's steering and directing it.
00:53:59 · Ian Silber, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:53:59] S1: Just recognizing that it's a totally rational feeling and it's a great time to just try to explore and see, what if I tried working... What if I tried rethinking about the tooling? Or, what if I just embraced like, "Oh, maybe I should prototype more. Let me try using these tools." But again, recognizing that maybe it helps to hear that I think that we're all still so early and it's still changing and just embracing that. Just have fun with it and see where it goes. And I think maybe another thing I would say is really try to focus on the output, the outcome. At the end of the day, we're not here to build tool processes. We're not here to build or tokenmax or something like that. We're here to make great software that people love or great products or whatever it is you do. But that's the thing that really matters. And if you focus on that, I think that you'll hopefully find that these tools can help you do that, but you still have a huge role in that as the person that's steering and directing it. [00:55:17] S0: So along those lines, I'm going to take us to a couple recurring corners of the podcast. The first corner is AI Corner. The question is just what's one way that you have found AI to be really useful in your job that maybe might inspire someone to use say ChatGPT or Codex?
00:55:17 · Lenny Rachitsky, Ian Silber
[00:55:17] S0: So along those lines, I'm going to take us to a couple recurring corners of the podcast. The first corner is AI Corner. The question is just what's one way that you have found AI to be really useful in your job that maybe might inspire someone to use say ChatGPT or Codex? [00:55:34] S1: As a designer designer, I mean, nowadays I spend less time in the pixels, but I really do use it to help me think through broader ideas. Or I'll have an idea at night or something, and then I'll just quickly type it in and have it prototype something. And it'll give me an idea that I can go and talk to the team about and it'll help visualize something. And so that's a part of the design process. It's early ideas or we're riffing through something and I found that ChatGPT, whether it's ChatGPT Work or Codex can really help me visualize that. That's been something that's been really fun. And then there's more of the operation side. It's like I have it now. Checking and making sure that important Slack messages that I need to follow up with are summarized and giving me context before important meetings or for recruiting or for every part of my process, I use this to augment the work that I do. [00:56:40] S0: That makes sense. On the prototyping piece, just to give someone a tip on how to do this, are you opening up on your phone and firing off just a Codex thread? What's the mechanic of doing this at night?