Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:21:38 · Andrew Ambrosino
[00:21:38] S0: Yeah, there's been a lot written about role collapse, existential role collapse. There are no roles anymore. We haven't seen that. We have seen more role collapse in the Codex org than I think other parts of the company and other parts of the economy. I think part of this is that this was a technical product for engineers. And so our designers speak engineer, our product managers speak technical language and write code. Alexander has a master's degree in computer science, which is, I do not have a master's degree in computer science. So we've seen a lot of role collapse. And I think that one of the ways that we describe how the groups work together is that there's significantly more overlap in the roles than there used to be. And everybody's sort of defined less by the fence and the boundaries of where design stops and engineering starts, but more the average of where they're working. So if you average up all of the things that somebody on our design team does, there's plenty of code writing things. There's plenty of things that are product work, but on average there are dots over here if you draw it out on a diagram. And this sort of speaks to the process too, especially because the entirety of the Codex app has been informed by the dog fooding loop. There is a desire among all of us to try to do as much as possible in the app even when it's not the best tool, so that it can become the best tool. And so a lot of design we all work on by using the app and say, "Okay, what's broken about this?" This is a whole thing we do, which is that we often don't improve our process so that we can make the product better to do it, which is a deeply uncomfortable place to be in. But week to week, it's changing.
00:23:30 · S1, Andrew Ambrosino
[00:23:30] S1: I love this point so much that what are you? It's your role is the average of what you spend your time on. If most of your work is PM-y work, then okay, you're PM for now. If it's engineering, you're an engineer for now. I feel like, was OpenAI the first company to call people member of technical staff? [00:23:46] S0: No, I believe that this might've started with Xerox. First company I interned at, it was a company called Upthere, did the same thing. This has been around. But it's much more common now, but it is kind of a tradition in research focused companies, right? [00:24:01] S1: Okay, got it. So it emerged from research. But I feel like it's such a, I don't know, sign of where things might be headed, this idea of we're just going to call everyone member of technical staff, your function isn't set. You're not in this bucket of the PM org or the eng org or the design org. Do you feel like that's where we all head long-term? Do you feel like functions will continue to exist? There's still the PM skillset and the eng skillset and the design skillset. And people are, "I'm a designer." Or do you think this is like, people call it builder. Do you feel like there's this collapse coming where everyone's everything and that's just the future? Or do you think we're going to continue to be mostly divided up in quadrants?
00:24:38 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[00:24:38] S0: Yeah. There are some things that I'm afraid of. And I think that some companies like to be very extreme about getting onto the bandwagon of whatever people say is going to happen. And I think part of the danger in eliminating the concept of roles is that it can dangerously eliminate the idea that things are specialties with knowable best practices. I've heard a lot of companies be like, "We're getting rid of the product role," which I think is by the way, a terrible idea. And everybody's just going to be a builder. And then what happens is this whole discipline of product that's been built up and has real best practices, real things that have been tried and failed, and real processes, that just gets abandoned. Because people are like, "Oh, I wrote some code." That's not a great place to be in. I think that the boundary of so and-so, this isn't your lane. I welcome that part going away. But there's a balance here where it's like not everyone can work on everything, for one, both in terms of breadth and depth rate. This is why managers are not going to go away. Not everybody can work on everything. And also every discipline has a skill component to it, which I think a lot of engineers are guilty of not recognizing that, "Well, engineering has a skill to it. It's writing code and other roles are just people vibing." It's like, "No, that's not how it works." Yes, you can use Excel, but you cannot work on the finance team, that kind of stuff, right? [00:26:24] S1: Yeah. I think there's also just like, "Do you want to be doing this work?" [00:26:27] S0: Yeah.
00:26:27 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[00:26:27] S0: Yeah. [00:26:27] S1: Do I want to be? [00:26:28] S0: I think more of it's that actually now, is it's easier to switch roles. It's easier to learn the best practices. It's easier to not tie your effectiveness in a role with the ability to use the exact tool. It's more of like, "Can you get yourself into this mindset, learn which things work and which don't, and then focus on it?" I spent so long feeling like I should not be a software engineer because I didn't care about assembly language or memorizing type scripts and texts. And it's like there have always been parts to these roles that are that sort of gatekeeping. That are like, "Well, no, being good at this role is being good at this tool." And I think that's what's kind of starting to erode. I think people take this, they hyperbolize all of this. [00:27:22] S1: What does your team look like on the Codex team? How many engineers, designers, PMs? What's kind of the makeup of the team right now?
00:27:22 · S1, Andrew Ambrosino
[00:27:22] S1: What does your team look like on the Codex team? How many engineers, designers, PMs? What's kind of the makeup of the team right now? [00:27:29] S0: Every time people ask me how many people are on the Codex team, do you remember my answer to this? I'm like, "It's somewhere between 10 and a few thousand." I mean, it's like a fake answer, but it's real in that we do see this as the culmination of what everybody works on here. Everything that goes into model research, everything that goes into how models are good at CUA and browser use. Everything about how model personality. All of the product work around front end infrastructure, all of the user, all of it is this product. At the same time, we are not accepting PRs daily from thousands and thousands of people on whatever they want. So we got a team, double digits of engineers, probably half that on the design side. A few product people, although product here is kind of more of a zone defense play. And I think one thing that is very common among everybody on the Codex side or on the desktop side is agency and taste, right? A lot of former founders or people who were at larger companies doing founder shaped things. A lot of people with immense taste. At OpenAI, we let teams get very large. So we haven't said, "Hey, there's no management," but the teams are quite large. It's mostly ICs and I think that's good.
00:27:29 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[00:27:29] S0: Every time people ask me how many people are on the Codex team, do you remember my answer to this? I'm like, "It's somewhere between 10 and a few thousand." I mean, it's like a fake answer, but it's real in that we do see this as the culmination of what everybody works on here. Everything that goes into model research, everything that goes into how models are good at CUA and browser use. Everything about how model personality. All of the product work around front end infrastructure, all of the user, all of it is this product. At the same time, we are not accepting PRs daily from thousands and thousands of people on whatever they want. So we got a team, double digits of engineers, probably half that on the design side. A few product people, although product here is kind of more of a zone defense play. And I think one thing that is very common among everybody on the Codex side or on the desktop side is agency and taste, right? A lot of former founders or people who were at larger companies doing founder shaped things. A lot of people with immense taste. At OpenAI, we let teams get very large. So we haven't said, "Hey, there's no management," but the teams are quite large. It's mostly ICs and I think that's good. [00:28:47] S1: You use this term zone defense for product work and that's really interesting. It kind of maps to the design kind of shift also, just like you're there to manage and coordinate. Talk a little bit more about what that looks like. What does zone defense look like for a product person?