Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:28:47 · S1, Andrew Ambrosino
[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? [00:29:00] S0: Yeah. And I have had a lot of conversations with Alexander about this analogy, which is that if two product people are working too closely, that's often not a good signal. And that you kind of want, as a product org, you sort of want to do this force directed activity. Where you're like, "Where are the gaps?" Especially in this new world where curation and steering and alignment is a lot of things. Where you're like, "There's a ton of chaos happening on people throwing ideas all over the place." The whole top down, year long planning thing, not going to work. And so now it's like we need the taste makers to guide things from inception to what the product should be. And that means you basically want company coverage. And so you spread out and you say, "All right, who's best at what? Let's create some space between us so that we got full coverage." And that's kind of how it goes. And then you fill in the gaps and you're like, "Look, we want to hire engineers who are product-minded." We don't want it to be that we've got a bunch of people writing a bunch of code that needs full team reviewing it for product coherence. We want everyone to have these skills, but I think what people go deep on has to change.
00:29:00 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[00:29:00] S0: Yeah. And I have had a lot of conversations with Alexander about this analogy, which is that if two product people are working too closely, that's often not a good signal. And that you kind of want, as a product org, you sort of want to do this force directed activity. Where you're like, "Where are the gaps?" Especially in this new world where curation and steering and alignment is a lot of things. Where you're like, "There's a ton of chaos happening on people throwing ideas all over the place." The whole top down, year long planning thing, not going to work. And so now it's like we need the taste makers to guide things from inception to what the product should be. And that means you basically want company coverage. And so you spread out and you say, "All right, who's best at what? Let's create some space between us so that we got full coverage." And that's kind of how it goes. And then you fill in the gaps and you're like, "Look, we want to hire engineers who are product-minded." We don't want it to be that we've got a bunch of people writing a bunch of code that needs full team reviewing it for product coherence. We want everyone to have these skills, but I think what people go deep on has to change. [00:30:14] S1: This is definitely a thread I've been noticing over and over with talking to folks like you. Is the most valuable person right now, one of the most valuable, is someone that could take an idea from idea to done with the taste to know this is great. [00:30:28] S0: Yeah.