Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:47:37 · Boris Cherny
[00:47:37] S0: Latent demand is this idea that if you build a product in a way that can be hacked, or can be misused by people in a way it wasn't really designed for to do something that they want to do, then this helps you as the product builder learn where to take the product next. So, an example of this is Facebook Marketplace. So, the manager for the team Fiona, she was actually the founding manager for the Marketplace team and she talks about this a lot. Facebook Marketplace is based on the observation back in ... This must have been, like, 2016 or something like this. That 40% of posts in Facebook groups are buying and selling stuff. So, this is crazy. It's, like, people are abusing the Facebook groups product to buy and sell, and it's not abuse in a security sense. It's abuse in that no one designed the product for this, but they're figuring it out, because it's just so useful for this. And so, it's pretty obvious. If you build a better product to let people buy and sell, they're going to like it. And it was just very obvious that Marketplace would be a hit from this. And so, the first thing was buy and sell groups, so, special purpose groups to let people do that, and the second product was Marketplace. Facebook Dating I think started in a pretty similar place. And I think the observation was if you look at profile views, so, people looking at each other's profiles on Facebook, 60% of profile views were people that are not friends with each other that are opposite gender. And so, this traditional dating setup, people are just creeping on each other. So, maybe if you can build a product for this, it might work. And so, this idea of latent demand I think is just so powerful. And, for example, this is also where Cowork came from. We saw that for the last six months or so, a lot of people using Claude Code were not using it to code. There was someone on Twitter that was using it to grow tomato plants. There was someone else using it to analyze their genome. Someone was using it to recover photos from a corrupted hard drive that was, like, wedding photos. There was someone that was using it for I think ... They were using it to analyze an MRI. So, there's just all these different use cases that are not technical at all, and it was just really obvious. Like, people are jumping through hoops to use a terminal to do this thing.