Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:06:47 · Ian Silber
We are driven by research and we treat our company as a research lab and we totally embrace that. And that's a new thing that I really learned and have really come to love about OpenAI is that started as a research lab, that DNA is deeply embedded in everything we do. And as designers, I think that you come here, we look for people that don't have a background in AI, but are really curious about the tools and how it can work. And we found that just by supporting that excitement to explore, that people feel less pressure. It's not like you need to change the way you work, but it's more about encouraging exploration. And when we've done that, when I go and talk to both very senior designers and early career designers at our company, they're so excited because they... I literally was just asking some people before this because I wanted to get some different takes. And I think the feeling is that they have so much more ability to be creative, to express themselves, to try bad ideas and throw them out. They can just really move through lots of different ideas and it becomes this incredible way to create. And the things that I'm seeing from my team, the bar is raising. I think the thinking is getting stronger the more that they're using these tools. So I think for the people that are starting to embrace this, they're starting to feel really excited and realizing that they have just so much agency as designers and so much more ability to have really high impact as a designer. What I see in the folks that I think are really embracing this, they are using it every step of the process to help them. And I think it helps. We have a community, of course, of designers that are all trying this together. So if there's any way to find that, and that's something that we should think about more as a broader community, how we help each other. But I think that learning different ways of working. And so it might be, "Okay, I have this idea. Let me just actually start by trying, what if I just threw this right into Codex or Claude?" or whatever tool you use. Throw it into an agent to help you think about it, to help you prototype it. Just try a different way of working. It doesn't necessarily mean that that has to be the exact right way, but I don't know. I think we've found that just people that are embracing this that are adaptable.
00:10:14 · Ian Silber
I think adaptability is another term that I think we all hear a lot now, but it's so true. It's knowing that this stuff changes very quickly. What didn't work yesterday might work today. I mean, literally within six months, this entire industry has shifted. I remember I was actually out on paternity leave towards the end of last year, and I was working on some side projects. I was trying some coding agents and it worked, but it just kept running into these hiccups. And then a month later, Codex drops and I try it again and it's like, oh my gosh, it just works. And that I think changes a lot of the design process because now all of a sudden, if you do have an idea, you can plop it in there and just try it. And so anyways, I think it's just really about not being scared. I think another thing to think about is that we're so early. We're so in early innings of this entire evolution. It feels like things have changed a lot, and it feels like maybe we're pretty far into this shift. But the good news for anybody who is trying to design or get into design, whether, again, if you're early career or late career, or you've never even actually designed anything, but you've been thinking about it, is we're all figuring this out as we go. Nobody has some perfect answer about how the design process should work. And whatever you think is working today will probably change again. And so I think what's encouraging about this is that nobody should feel behind right now. I think that if you literally started today, you're going to have a leg up on pretty much most people. And just really thinking about how you can just make great stuff. And there's just so much opportunity to change the way you work or just to make great things. And what we think is really cutting edge today will look so archaic in a year, let alone a month. And that's something I've learned. I've been at OpenAI for three years, and I think about the stuff that we were working on when I first joined. I mean, I remember getting a demo of our early voice mode that we hadn't shipped or computer use that barely worked. And now it literally has become part of the process of how we design. We use both of those tools to build software. And so anyways, the point is it's changing very quickly. We're all extremely early in this process and nobody really has it figured out.
00:13:41 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:13:41] S0: I love that. You've also, when we were chatting ahead of this, you actually told me you believe this is the best time in history to be a designer.
00:13:48 · Ian Silber
[00:13:48] S1: Yeah. I mean, I truly believe this. I can't even imagine... Okay, history lesson. When I was getting into design, I was in my teenage years and to learn things, I was learning to design and code, and you could view source on a HTML webpage and see how things were built. And that was how you had to learn. And you could, I don't know, it's like Dreamweaver. And there were these really... tools that actually were really cool. But to compare those to today, if I were just getting into design, the fact that you can learn so quickly, you can have an idea to working version of it in a matter of minutes. You can be so expressive and I think anybody can be a designer. And I think that as more and more software is made, more and more products are made, I do think that the human element of design is going to really start to become more and more important. It's always been the case that I think that companies with great design can of course stand out. I think that's going to be more and more important. I think that products that fully understand their users and that make something delightful, when anybody can make anything, that's going to become one of the most important dimensions of a product and that's how people are going to evaluate it. And so I think designers stand... that is our core job. And then on top of that, I think that designers are just much more empowered. So I was talking to some friends that are thinking about starting a company and talking about the ratio of design to engineer and how at a startup, maybe that's totally different. It may have been like you're going to have one designer and I don't know, 15 engineers or something like that. Maybe at a startup, I've seen that sort of ratio. But they were talking about, "Well, maybe we'll have two designers and one engineer. One really good engineer who can make sure that we're really building something that's rock solid from an engineering standpoint, but then we want two really creative people that are going to be thinking about how we build this product." And so thinking about that, I think that there's just a huge opportunity for designers.
00:16:35 · Ian Silber, Lenny Rachitsky
I think that internally we see that more and more designers, we are completely empowered, to take an idea, to take a early research concept and try to figure out how we can actually package that up into something that people want to use or that solves some sort of unmet need for our customers. And that is a designer's job. And so I think that maybe more and more people start to think of themselves as designers. But either way, I really do think it's the best time to be a designer. [00:17:13] S0: So along those lines, when Marc Andreessen was on the podcast, he had this hilarious way of describing the state of the product org right now. He's like, basically there's this three-way standoff. PMs, engineers, designers, they all think the other roles are going to go away and they're the ones that are going to win in the end. And so there's those Spider-Man meme where they're all pointing at each other. And I'm curious, because I can see a case for each role becoming the dominant role. And I completely agree with you that with all of the tools being shipped, there's a thousand X explosion in products being shipped. There's just endless streams of things to pay attention to. You'd think design would be such an opportunity to differentiate and stand out. I haven't seen that yet in just an acceleration of design hires and explosion, as you said, two designers to one engineer. Do you think that's coming? Why do you think that hasn't happened yet? Do you think it's, as you said, just early and people will realize, "Oh wow, we need a lot more designers."? What do you think's going on?
00:18:12 · Ian Silber
[00:18:12] S1: We might start to see that happen more. Or if anything, we might start to see engineers wanting to become a little bit more design focused. I also think that designers are getting more productive. It's not necessarily the same direct output of engineers 10Xing, but we are seeing that designers are able to do a lot more. But no, I mean, I think that is something we're always thinking about and evolving. The other thing I wanted to talk about too is the difference between PM and edge and design, and are they all blurring together? And my point of view is that they definitely are, and there's always been overlap as far as I've seen it. I've seen designers that are really good product manager type, archetype, but can design. And I've seen designers that are really good polish engineer type. So I've always found that these single siloed role definitions don't really make sense. It's just that at big companies you have to have a ladder to put people on so you can generally organize. But in the reality, when you look at a team, you see that there are people that have various strengths and people that play different roles. And so I've always seen that. I think those lines have always been blurry, but they're becoming blurrier for sure. But the other thing is I do still think that, and maybe this is thinking about it from a slightly larger company perspective, but I think you do still need people that have certain responsibilities. Because if you have one person that's expected to design, to rally a team around something, to align a whole company, to do all the work that a PM does, for example, and also be designing it and also be engineering it, it might be hard to find one person that's good at all of those different skills. And so I still find a lot of value, for example, in having an excellent PM that can help rally multiple teams together, that can help sharpen the perspective or the problem space that a team is focused on, that can help with resourcing, all of those things. And so I do think there will still be value in these and people focused on different parts of building a project or a product.