Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:01:05 · S1, Andrew Ambrosino
[00:01:05] S1: Do you feel like there's this collapse coming where everyone's everything and that's just the feature? Or do you think we're going to continue to be mostly divided up? [00:01:11] S0: There are some things that I'm afraid of. I've heard a lot of companies be like, "We're getting rid of the product role and everybody's just going to be a builder." And then what happens is... [00:01:22] S1: Today, my guest is Andrew Ambrosino, product and engineering lead for the Codex app at OpenAI. Codex is quickly becoming people's go-to app for building products and also for non-product work like organizing files in your computer, drafting documents, doing data analysis, reading your emails, and a lot more. If you stick around for the end of this episode, we actually have a little clip from after we stopped recording where the producer in the room started talking about how he uses Codex in his editing work. Since this January, Codex usage has grown 6X. They currently have over five million weekly active users. I suspect this number is quickly going to be out of date. Internally at OpenAI, nearly 100% of their employees use Codex weekly and that is not just the engineers. Andrew is a designer, turned engineer, turned product manager, who's building the app that more and more of the world is using to build their own products. [00:02:37] S0: Thank you for having me. [00:02:38] S1: This is a rare in-person podcast. I rarely do this kind of thing. We'll see how it goes. [00:02:42] S0: We'll see.
00:02:42 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[00:02:42] S0: We'll see. [00:02:42] S1: We'll see if people like these more. When we were preparing for this chat, I asked you what's the biggest thing you want people to get out of this conversation? And you said that it was how AI is changing the shape of product work. You're working at maybe the most bleeding edge, AI-pilled software team there is. So you have a really interesting lens into where things are heading, where other teams are going to be in a year or two or more. What does the shape of product team look like now versus a couple years ago?
00:03:09 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[00:03:09] S0: One of the hardest things to do right now as a leader building these products is just sort of the inversion of the process in my mind, which I think a lot of people have talked about, which is that anybody can build anything. I generally believe now that starting from scratch, if you talk to these models, ours, anybody else's really, you can stand up whatever feature you want. And that's not necessarily a hard part of software, but that's really cool. And I think that has created an environment where people are making all of this. You give people unlimited tokens. Everybody at OpenAI is very agentic, has great ideas. And so everybody's building everything. Whereas I think you look back at product process that we've all run for a long time and it's been a little bit opposite. It's been kind of research, ideation, maybe there was some prototyping. But it was even when we got past waterfall, it was still kind of flavored of the implementation is expensive. And so what you want to do is you want to de-risk all implementation upfront through documents, through research, through prototypes. Because prototypes and designs are cheaper was kind of the assumption there. And that's changed. That's totally changed. And right now I'm sure there are 90 different explorations for... There's this feature that we desperately need to do that I'm sure there are 90 different uncoordinated teams implementing and trying, right? [00:04:48] S1: Yeah.
00:04:48 · S1, Andrew Ambrosino
[00:04:48] S1: Yeah. [00:04:50] S0: So I guess the short answer is it's backwards. And it's not that people are doing fundamentally different roles or focusing on different things or that even skillsets have vanished or that roles have just disappeared. It's that it's backwards. The implementation is actually not the expensive part anymore. It's, dare I say, taste. But it's the curation process. It's like of those 90 attempts, what's good about these? What should we fold into other aspects of this? How should we frame this? Should it be part of this other feature? How many segments should be in the toggle? All of those things. Yeah. [00:06:46] S1: Here's what we're going to build, here's the feature, here's the strategies, PRD. Today, what you're describing, which makes all the sense, is people just create a prototype. And what you're saying is people across the company have kind of similar ideas. And now instead of a doc, they create their little prototype. And that leads to kind of 90 different things people can look at and maybe pick here's a direction we want to go down. Is that the idea?
00:07:05 · Andrew Ambrosino
[00:07:05] S0: Yeah. There's a lot of this. And it's not just happening here. You've seen many product leaders say PRDs are dead and prototypes are in. And I actually don't believe this at all. I think that one of the interesting things that is happening right now is that because implementation has gotten so cheap across every medium, it's very tempting to jump straight to a prototype. Especially if you're not an engineer. Especially if you've never been able to write code or never been interested or never had the time, it's really tempting to say like, "PRDs are dead. Let me just show you what I mean." What I've also noticed though is that for engineers, it's really tempting to write a lot of documents, a lot of documents that are not worth reading. This is no shade on people writing documents. It's that if implementation is abundant, then it's really important to pick the right format for the point you're trying to make. If that point is product clarity around a vague area, then it might actually be a document. If what you're trying to do is get something in people's hands to try out and to stress test an interaction pattern, it's a prototype. But I think this is kind of the funny thing now, which is that it's really important to pick the medium.
00:08:28 · S1
[00:08:28] S1: There's this term that a podcast guest shared that I think about when you say this, which is it's called the primal mark. When a designer or a painter or an artist just creates the first mark on a painting or a piece of art, that mark is what you start to respond to. And so everything kind of trickles down from that first mark you make. And what I'm hearing you saying is sometimes the prototype is the wrong first thing to do because then you're just responding to this prototype versus a different idea versus a bigger idea. So I love hearing this. So everyone's just like, "Okay, forget it. No more writing, no more docs, no more PRDs." You're saying, "They're actually still useful for specific use cases."