Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:30:28 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[00:30:28] S0: Yeah. [00:30:28] S1: Just shepherding throughout, this obsession with making it awesome. This kind of high agency, high taste person exactly as you described. Is that kind of the way you think about here's who we're hiring, here's who's going to do really well in this new world? [00:30:40] S0: Yeah, I think that's the core piece right now. And it also speaks to how I sort of see IC versus management, which is that it's not that management is going away. It's not that everyone's an IC, but everyone's kind of both now. If you are an IC, you're not typing code out character by character. You are managing something. You're managing agents. You are managing work that is happening that comes together to do a certain thing. If you're a manager of teams, you're doing the same thing just at a different granularity. I generally look for obviously command over the discipline, but then the taste to say, "Hey, you're going to have unlimited tokens and we can't just be doing slop." You need to be able to determine what signal, what's noise in a world of just infinite content. [00:31:38] S1: Mention planning. At the pace things are moving, it's become very hard to plan roadmaps. I imagine, especially in your world. [00:31:47] S0: People are very frustrated with me all the time on this. Yes. [00:31:50] S1: Because things are just constantly shifting, things are changing. How do you plan on your team? How far ahead are you thinking and what does a plan look like? Is it a spreadsheet? Is it MD file? What's the output of a plan?