Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:42:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Boris Cherny
[00:42:29] S1: Do you find these three separate disciplines still useful as a way to think about the team? Their engineering, design, product management, do you find those ... Even though, they are now coding and contributing to thinking about what to build do you feel like those are three roles that will persist long-term? At least, at this point. [00:42:46] S0: I think in the short-term it'll persist, but one thing that we're starting to see is there's maybe a 50% overlap in those roles where a lot of people are actually just doing the same thing, and some people have specialties. For example, I code a little bit more [inaudible 00:42:58] Kat, our PM, does a little bit more coordination or planning or forecasting, or things like this. [00:43:04] S1: Stakeholder alignment. [00:43:06] S0: Stakeholder alignment. Exactly. I do think that there is a future where I think by the end of the year what we're going to start to see is these start to get even murkier where I think in some places the title software engineer is going to start to go away, and it's just going to be replaced by builder or maybe it's just everyone is going to be a product manager and everyone codes, or something like this.
00:43:26 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:43:26] S1: Who says hiring has to be fair? Every founder and hiring manager I've been speaking with these days is feeling the same pressure. Hire the best people as fast as possible, but recruiting is time-consuming, alignment is hard, and competition for great talent keeps getting tighter. That's why teams like ElevenLabs, Brex, Replit, Deal, and 5000 other organizations use Metaview, the AI company giving high-performance teams a real, unfair advantage in hiring. They give you a suite of AI agents that behave like recruiting coworkers. They find candidates for you based on your exact criteria, take interview notes automatically, gather insights across your hiring process, and help you identify the best candidates in your pipeline. AI handles the recruiting toil and gives you a real source or truth. That means our [inaudible 00:44:17] and a team focused on what matters most, winning the right candidates. Don't let your competitors out-hire you. Metaview customers close roles 30% faster. Try Metaview today for free and get an extra month of sourcing at Metaview.AI/Lenny. That's M-E-T-A View dot AI slash Lenny. You talked about how you're enjoying coding more. I actually did this little informal survey on Twitter. I don't know if you saw this where I just asked ... I did three different polls. I asked engineers, "Are you enjoying your job more or less since adopting AI tools?" And then I did a separate one for PMs, and one for designers. And both engineers and PMs, 70% of people said they are enjoying their job more. And about 10% said they're enjoying their job less. Designers, interestingly, only 55% said they are enjoying their job more, and 20% said they're enjoying their job less. I thought that was really interesting.
00:45:11 · Boris Cherny, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:45:11] S0: That's super interesting. I'd love to talk to these people, both in the more bucket and the less bucket just to understand. Did you get to follow up with any of them? [00:45:20] S1: A few people replied, and we're actually doing a followup poll that we'll look to in the show notes of going deeper into some of the stuff. But a lot ... There's the factors that make it more fun and less fun. The designers, they didn't share a lot actually of just the people that [inaudible 00:45:33]. I actually asked just like, "Why are you enjoying your job less?" I didn't hear a lot. So, I'm curious what's going on there. [00:45:37] S0: Yeah. I'm seeing this a little bit with ... At Anthropic, I think everyone is fairly technical. This is something that we screen for when people join. There's a lot of technical interviews that people go through even for non-technical functions. And our designers largely code. So, I think for them this is something that they have enjoyed from what I've seen, because now instead of bugging engineers they can just go in and code. And even some designers that didn't code before have just started to do it, and for them it's great, because they can unblock themselves. But I'd be really interested just to hear more people's experiences, because I bet it's not uniform like that.
00:45:37 · Boris Cherny, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:45:37] S0: Yeah. I'm seeing this a little bit with ... At Anthropic, I think everyone is fairly technical. This is something that we screen for when people join. There's a lot of technical interviews that people go through even for non-technical functions. And our designers largely code. So, I think for them this is something that they have enjoyed from what I've seen, because now instead of bugging engineers they can just go in and code. And even some designers that didn't code before have just started to do it, and for them it's great, because they can unblock themselves. But I'd be really interested just to hear more people's experiences, because I bet it's not uniform like that. [00:46:18] S1: Yeah. So, maybe if you're listening to this leave a comment if you're finding your job is less fun, and you're enjoying your job less, because what you're saying and what I'm hearing from most people, 70% of PMs and engineers are loving their job more. Like, if you're [inaudible 00:46:30] bucket, you could ... Something's going on.
00:46:18 · Lenny Rachitsky, Boris Cherny
[00:46:18] S1: Yeah. So, maybe if you're listening to this leave a comment if you're finding your job is less fun, and you're enjoying your job less, because what you're saying and what I'm hearing from most people, 70% of PMs and engineers are loving their job more. Like, if you're [inaudible 00:46:30] bucket, you could ... Something's going on. [00:46:32] S0: Yeah. Yeah. We do see that people use also different tools. So, for example, our designers they use the Claude desktop app a lot more to do their coding. So, you just download the desktop app. There's a code tab. It's right next to Cowork. And it's actually the same as at Claude Code. So, it's the same agent, and everything. We've had this for many, many months. And so, you can use this to code in a way that you don't have to open a bunch of terminals. But you still get the power of Claude Code, and the biggest thing is you can just run as many Claude sessions in parallel as you want. We call this multi-Claude-ing. So, it's a little more native I think for folks that are not engineers, and really this is back to bringing the product to where the people are. You don't want to make people use a different workflow. You don't want to make them go out of their way to learn a new thing. It's whatever people are doing, if you can make that a little bit easier, then that's just going to be a much better product that people enjoy more. And this is just this principle of latent demand, which I think is just the single-most important principle in product.
00:46:32 · Boris Cherny, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:46:32] S0: Yeah. Yeah. We do see that people use also different tools. So, for example, our designers they use the Claude desktop app a lot more to do their coding. So, you just download the desktop app. There's a code tab. It's right next to Cowork. And it's actually the same as at Claude Code. So, it's the same agent, and everything. We've had this for many, many months. And so, you can use this to code in a way that you don't have to open a bunch of terminals. But you still get the power of Claude Code, and the biggest thing is you can just run as many Claude sessions in parallel as you want. We call this multi-Claude-ing. So, it's a little more native I think for folks that are not engineers, and really this is back to bringing the product to where the people are. You don't want to make people use a different workflow. You don't want to make them go out of their way to learn a new thing. It's whatever people are doing, if you can make that a little bit easier, then that's just going to be a much better product that people enjoy more. And this is just this principle of latent demand, which I think is just the single-most important principle in product. [00:47:29] S1: Can you talk about that actually? Because I was going to go there. Explain what this principle is and just what happens when you unlock this latent demand.