Nikhyl Singhal on the AI-Driven Renaissance and Challenges for Product Managers

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Transcript

The skills that used to be really valued in product managers are changing substantially.

It's going to be a start.

Industry is very much in stress.

Nothing's constant.

Everyone's in a state of alert.

A few talk to product leaders three years ago.

Their day was largely moving information.

The information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur.

I just did this report on the job market.

Interestingly, even the most open-pm roles globally in three-plus years.

This is a complete Renaissance for the product industry.

But it comes with a lot of strings attached.

In the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to see massive shedding of staffs and then massive rehiring.

You might see a company shed 30,000 and higher $8,000.

But the $8,000 people are going to all be AI first.

The builders are going to have the time of their lives.

But if you don't love building stuff, you're in trouble.

What are some things that people should do to thrive in this future that is emerging?

You have to find ability to increase pace.

You got to find that reserve.

The next two years requires a lot of fire and development.

Today, my guest is Nikhil Shingol.

Nikhil is, in my opinion, right now, the number one best source of career advice for product managers and for tech people in general.

He was a long time exec at Meta and at Google, CPO at Credit Karma.

He's also a four-time founder, and he leads the best community out there for heads of product and cheap product officers called the skip community.

He also has a larger community for tech professionals called the skip coach.

And through these communities and his 30 years of building consumer products at scale.

And also his podcast, which I recently partnered with, he is constantly gathering and meeting with and speaking with top product leaders around the world about what's happening and what's changing in lives of product managers and tech workers in general.

And the answer is a lot.

This is an episode that every single product person needs to listen to.

And you won't find a more real talk and actionable overview of what is going on and where things are heading in your career and also what you should be doing about it right now.

Seriously, do not miss this conversation.

Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's productfast.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers.

With that, I bring you Nick Hell, Singol.

Nick Hell, thank you so much for being here and welcome back to the podcast.

Yeah, thank you, Lenny.

I appreciate a version two and all my notes were like Lenny version two.

So I'm quite excited about being back on the show.

You've done so well since the last time that I visited and appreciate the opportunity to share with you my current thing.

Yeah, so you were actually one of the launch episodes of the first 2030 guests that I had on the podcast.

This was two or three years ago, something like that.

And a lot has changed in the world of product management since then.

And we're going to be basically spending this entire episode talking about what is changing in the role and the career of a product manager.

And what I especially love about you talking to you and hearing your insights is you don't sugarcoat.

What's going on?

You're very real about like, here's what you need to know about what is going on.

So we're going to be talking about the good and the bad and just like a lot of advice for product managers in particular.

To kick things off, give us just kind of the big picture of you into what is changing for product managers the good and then maybe the the scary stuff.

Yeah, be a lot shorter of an episode if we just talked about what didn't change.

Well, I think that's a lot.

Maybe I'll start with this.

I think that when we first had Chad at it was like in maybe the end of COVID, I think the ZERP era as we called it zero interest, you know, kind of free money from from investors was just kind of cresting.

We talked about how ICs are now more in demand.

We talked about how these first round of layoffs are resisting that ex growth companies are going to be a struggle.

But if you really talk to product leaders that were kind of in that mode, maybe three years ago, they weren't very happy.

And what I mean by that is their day was largely a day of moving information from one to another.

Let me frame the way that my team is presenting the information to my boss so that that person can frame it to their boss's boss.

And generally the function had become extremely focused on responsibility without authority.

And so that is a greatest form of workplace stress.

Now, we don't talk about that.

We talk about all the stresses that we have today.

Boy, AI is going to replace our function, et cetera, et cetera.

But the honest truth is if you think back, if you've been in product for a handful of years, that was a tough time.

Now, people were being paid well.

Layoffs were just starting.

The industry was huge.

There's the biggest it's ever been.

There were more product managers, more CPOs that ever existed in history.

What's changed is people are having fun again, particularly product folks, because they're able to build, they don't have to rely on as many people to have impact.

There's much more of a direct connection to their ideas and their ability to test and connect their product instincts to their customers.

And so in many ways, this is a complete Renaissance for the product industry.

For a lot of the strongest builders in the group that I'm associated with, compensation is an all-time high.

They have more offers than they ever seen.

They see their next job, maybe being a founder, maybe being a CEO, maybe being in another function, other than product, but being in the C level.

They're feeling like there's more opportunities than ever before.

So that's kind of a good I would say, you know, honesty, it comes with a lot of strings attached.

I think that it starts with just being exhausted.

I have never seen as industry that's more tired than they are now.

I mean, I think we were tired during COVID, but for different reasons.

Now, I think nothing's constant.

There's, you know, once you figure out how to do your job in the past, you would be fine for a decade until you became a manager and then you would be fine until you became an executive.

Now, if you don't stay up in the next three months, they'll be like, oh, you're doing that thing.

We stop doing that three months ago.

We don't do that anymore.

Oh, you know, PRDs.

Well, you know, that's not even a product.

You know, everything feels like everyone's in a state of alert.

And I think that in addition, now you're hearing tens of thousands of people are being shed by larger employers that are also hiring and paying triple wages.

So like that's like mind-boggling that, you know, depending on your perspective, you might be on one side or the other.

And I think that particularly a lot of the mid-career people, people that are like, let's haunt in their 30s, you know, life plays this cruel trick on you, where you end up having your best, most energetic years of your career, your power years of career, because you finally have figured out what you're doing.

But at the same time, you may be settling down.

You may have kids, your parents are aging, and you, for the first time, have those aches and pains in your body.

You have to think about diet.

You can eat cookies every day.

You have to exercise.

And so between your health, the family and friends that you hardly ever see, your parents, which are now worrying, because you have to build a different relationship with them, never becoming dependents.

You're actual dependents, which you're kids.

And then, oh, by the way, your work, which is, you know, will take whatever time you have.

But it also changes all the time.

That generation is insanely stressed, historically.

And now, really like, hey, stay up, you know, what's the latest in cloud code they changed this morning?

It's it's it's dizzy.

So I think there's joy, but there's fatigue in a way that I haven't quite seen before.

Wow.

What an incredible overview.

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So you talk to, I don't know, hundreds of product leaders regularly run these communities for CPOs and senior product leaders.

I guess on balance, or people doing, would you say, better than the last than like two, three years ago, or is it just like, oh man, everyone's like burning out and in big trouble?

I think that how people would describe it and how I describe it is slightly different.

I tend to be more around like when people are doing better, I think they have more choice and they're a long term going to be happier.

From that perspective, I think people are better at the top of their game, are doing much better.

For the reasons I mentioned, they're just more interested in their jobs.

I think that they're more stressed.

But I think they're stressed because they wish they had more time to feed the Lalan at night, which is a different form of stress than the stress that they experienced in the past, which is, I don't know if my point or my team is going to get through the malaise of decisioning that exists here.

So I think that people are doing better.

However, I think our industry is very much in stress.

I think that on average people, even if they're doing well, they feel more stressed because they worry they're not keeping up or they worry that this industry is going to change and it's going to essentially they'll be roadkill along that way.

And so that has to lot to do with, you know, people are not, you know, generally that er, and they don't always believe that everything's going to work itself out and there's a lot of evidence that things are changing and it's a change is hard on humans.

And so I think that there's a combination of both.

But I think the best people tend to be feeling great right now.

We're going to talk about of the people that are doing best.

What are they doing differently?

But before we get there, let's think about the future of where things are heading.

You talked about a bunch of the things that have already changed and how different the world of product management is.

What do you think will change further in the next couple of years to give people a sense of where things are heading?

Yeah, I had this, this meetup last Thursday and it was a fun meetup.

You know, I have a group of about 125 heads of products and we kind of gather once a month in San Francisco.

And during this meetup, you know, we took an approach where lots of people were building things for their own companies or on their own to help themselves with productivity.

And so we said, hey, why don't we do a show in top?

Why don't we just have you, if you're ahead of product, just show kind of things that are interesting that are worth worth explaining.

And so we had to start up and show what they're doing and then we had some mid-sized companies and some late-stage companies.

And, you know, it was a few things that were really palpable.

One was there was so much joy in the audience that people were like, oh, I've been building this thing and let me show you and everyone had their laptop and they were like, one up in each other and they were like, new year chief of staff does that, my chief of staff does this thing.

So that sort of builds on my point that people are having fun being hands on.

But the second thing is that the way they talk about how product decisions are made, the way they talked about how prioritization is determined, the way they talked about information moves within the company, look like a completely foreign animal from anything that I had experienced when I was working, you know, a few years back.

And I got up on stage and I said, you know, if you think about how we work right now and how you folks are all talking about, you know, using agents in your enterprise, how you're using chief of staff apps to essentially drive more productivity, how all of you are essentially spending all your time just focusing on judgment and you're spending all your time taking anything that can be obsolete and writing software around it.

None of that was even in the language even in the vernacular 12 months ago.

So now what does it look like in 12 months and everyone kind of had a pause and they're like, yeah, this was sort of on, you know, it was impossible to anticipate what this conversation looked like 12 months ago.

It's pretty hard to understand where things are going, but but I would say I think maybe I'll answer your question around where things are going in the next couple of years based on kind of how I think companies are in changing how people are going to change.

So I think on the company side, I think that and then maybe I'll slam it more towards product for a second.

So product leaders will increasingly get paid and be asked to drive judgment and then be the tip of this fear on trying to essentially obsolete everything else through software, through AI, through agents.

And this is partly why there's a lot of excitement because just to be very honest with you in European and I was a PM, most of the stuff that you didn't like doing are the things that AI is really taking a real crack ad.

And so I think that's super interesting.

I think that there's a ton of that change that's going to happen.

Some companies are doing it now.

Some companies will do it.

But within two years, I think most of these companies will obsolete all the mechanical parts of building product.

I think that there will be 10 to 100 times more changes that will be presented to products than ever before because now the cost of testing something, the cost of changing is going to be much much and so when things are changing that rapidly, that judgment piece becomes like pretty much paramount.

Just to make sure we understand when you say judgment, what do you, what should people be thinking of when you when you talk about the judgment?

I think that it's sort of evaluating whether the thing that we're changing is a good or bad thing.

I think that it's also evaluating whether we should change the product in one way versus another.

You can't build 100 custom versions of the same product.

It affects your brand, it affects the event capability, et cetera.

So when customers are asking for things, when you're trying to think through how do you build something that's sustainable, differentiated, that's judgment.

And evaluating whether it's successfully met that criteria and whether it's worth building and worth releasing, it's almost like the system skill that's existed from the beginning of the internet.

It's, you know, hey, it's not about the future.

It's around the system that we're putting together.

The platform, if you will, that's, you know, kind of enabling capability.

Right.

So that's the judgment of, boy, there's all these changes coming in.

They're going to happen more frequently.

You know, as an aside, because of all these changes, I think that in two years, I think there won't be any more bad software.

I mean, this is maybe more of a wish in a dream than a prediction.

But I think that if you count in the week, in your given week, how much bad software you come back with, right?

You know, I have a house and it has like 15 different apps that run to control everything from the shades to their conditioner, to, you know, garage door.

And almost every one of those apps are afforded.

They don't work particularly well.

They never get mon of things break, you know, and then projects like all that stuff's going to get fixed.

Because someone's going to basically sit down and tell Claude to fix it.

And it's just going to fix it.

And it's going to fix it.

It's going to be more secure to it.

So I think that that's changing.

And so people will have a lot less tolerance for, for bad software.

And one of those lines is real quick.

It could go aside to your side.

The prompt I constantly find myself using with codex and Claude is just, how can we make the product experience better?

How can we make this better?

And just ask that, it's like here's 10 ways we can make it better.

And so he's like, wow, these are really good.

It is.

And then cool.

Do you do the first seven?

Exactly.

There's going to be like some super skill that's going to run against every piece of software that's in the app store.

And it's going to basically go in and it's going to fix them all.

And then they're going to get released and they're going to be like, oh, that's just just significantly more consistent, better, less buggy experience, and more maintainable.

And so that's why there's a lot of optimism, right?

Because there's these changes going to be done pretty automatically.

Yeah, just like it's easy to just to kind of finish that loop real quick.

Like so many of these apps are built by engineers that are not the best engineers.

They're engineers that, you know, like companies hired that don't really care about their software.

They're just like, this is just like a side thing building this thing that we have just app.

We just need to build an app.

Let's find so into build it.

They're not like product for his companies.

And now all these companies have access to the most skilled software engineer, Claude, Codex and all these other jewels.

So I, I totally see what you're saying.

Like everyone has the best engineers available now.

And it's just an English task them to build the better thing or build a better app.

So that's a really interesting point.

It still boggles my mind.

Yeah, everyone's like, oh, what's the cutting edge and all that?

I think there's still, I don't know if this is true even today.

But very recently, there were more lines of cobalt than I think any other language out there.

And mainframe sales continued to do pretty well.

And they're unusually large line item for companies like IBM.

And part of the reason why these systems like, you know, I think I spent an hour and a half trying to get my mileage plus a count on united to work correctly with my daughter's phone and all this other stuff.

Partly because these systems are so complicated, but they're built in mainframes, right?

And a lot of the engineers, and this is going to sound kind of morbid, but you know, I think it's true, a lot of the engineers are dead, like they literally are passed away.

They were written, you know, 10, 20 years ago.

And like going in and touching that code is, you know, probably the last thing anymore wants to just say, nobody goes in there, you know, it's all downside.

Now we can change that.

So I'm like very excited about what it means to go in and improve things that people take with granted, right?

That's a big one.

That's a bit of an aside.

I think that the other thing that I think is worth kind of signaling is I think that the way we, the skills that you need to be effective in today's world is a is an acceleration of what we were talking about last episode.

We were talking about ICs, we were talking about hands-on, we're talking about opinion, even back then.

Before, you know, Claude and Trappuccino between others kind of came about.

I think what we're now seeing is companies are looking very, very carefully at their staffing.

And they're asking themselves, one, do we need this many people?

Did we over hire?

And part of the reason is they're looking, maybe we doubled our staff in the last five years, lots of companies that are public about them.

Do we get twice as much for them?

You know, it was funny when I was at Google, in about over 10, 15 years ago, we used to ask ourselves, you know, I was on an ancillary team.

I wasn't in the search of the ads team.

We used to ask ourselves like, how many people are really needed for Google to hit their numbers?

And, you know, they were back at the time 20, 30, 40,000 people.

And, you know, if you're asked someone who wasn't in tech, you were like, oh, probably like 90% of those folks, obviously.

And, you know, the answers probably closer to like 9%.

You know, probably you need like 500 people to keep the lights on and build that business.

You don't need 25, 30, 40,000 people.

So there's a huge amount of overhead where companies hire not just because they want to, you know, have bureaucrats because they want to expand.

They want to try new things.

But I think that there's a judgment day that's come back where companies are like, look, we aren't getting as much for the staff that we grew in the last five years.

And, this AI thing requires a totally different skill set.

The combination is going to mean this year I predict in the next 12 to 24 months.

We're going to see massive shedding of staffs and then massive re-hiring.

But the you might see a company shed 30,000 and higher 8,000.

But the 8,000 people are going to hire are going to all be AI first.

And the 30,000 they're going to let go of are going to be in combination of we didn't get as much for those folks that we needed and we wanted to sort of set the, we want to set the destination differently with a much lighter payload.

And that's that's dark.

That's going to make this year and the next year, you know, year going to be pretty pretty challenging.

So I'll transition a little bit to my thoughts on people about pause for a second to see if this resonates with you.

That's a scary to hear.

We're going to talk about what folks listening can do to be in to do their best to be in that second bucket of being re-hired and in kept because there's a lot you can do and there's a lot of people that know they need to change and adjust and they're not doing anything.

And now we want to talk about maybe some of the blockers there.

One thing I'll note as I should have mentioned this earlier, I just did this report on job the job market and interestingly as of today at least.

We have the most open PM roles globally at tech companies in three plus years.

The last time it was this high was kind of during COVID basically.

So there's some good news there at least for the PM role.

Yeah, that's a prize you learning.

Yeah, I did because there's always the sense that, you know, why don't we need PMs?

That's the point.

We have AI just built stuff and like my sense, I've always been saying this.

I feel like the PM skills, the most important valuable skill of all the skills and I know every role thinks this about their roles.

It's like no design.

We sign with anything now.

But I feel like what you said where it's deciding what to build, deciding if this is good and great and ready and prioritizing.

I feel like that's what remains.

So to me makes sense.

We report came out for two at its time because it was right before I was preparing to kind of come on the show.

And the third point I was going to make is, you know, builders are going to have the time in their lives, comps actually up and the barrier is, you know, essentially back in in in favor.

And I think those three things came very much loud and clear in your report.

And I think the question around, hey, why are product managers doing so well?

Why are there so many jobs when in reality a lot of product people that all of us know are struggling to find a role or we're hearing about these layoffs?

I think it depends on how you define what a product manager is.

And I think that for the first time, I think that we did have a dramatic shift in what's defined.

We three years ago talked about, hey, product managers, there's lots of archetypes, some archetypes are actually more in favor.

This was the IC conversation, the builder conversation.

Now what we're essentially saying is the the information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur.

And I think about half of the product people that were kind of that grew into the industry, you know, have that skill and superpower.

And then there were a set of people who got into product because they liked to build stuff.

You know, and, you know, folks like yourself who were founder who that was sort of the motivation and joining kind of the industry and then they found themselves into this thing called product management.

Those ones are builders, you know, and those people are the ones that are being hired by your survey.

I think those product managers, everybody wants a builder.

And I think that interestingly, lots of engineers are builders, lots of designers are builders, lots of marketing folks are builders.

And I think builders wanted is going to be the big tagline for the next couple of years.

And it is so fun to build.

I, I'll bet you.

And this is a prediction that if you had a choose between preparing a podcast and sitting in code acts or sitting in cloud code and like working on your laptop, you would prefer the latter.

It is fun.

Yeah, just like progress.

He just makes so much for it's like, Lee, this thing, you know, it's getting better.

Yeah, I mean, what I was a PM, I used to take a break and go and go change the light bulbs in the house.

And the reason why I would change the light bulbs is that light bulb was broken.

But then I replaced it and the light came on and man was that satisfying because in a product job, there is very few days of satisfaction because you don't really have the ability to see something broken that gets fixed.

It's just part of the challenge in having responsibility without authority.

Until now, now you can participate in the joy.

You can create a design.

You don't have to wait for the designer and convince the designer to go and actually work through this or put your stuff on a back lawn.

You don't have to do that.

And so I think that the builders are going to have a time of their lives.

And I think they're going to be very focused on judgment.

I think that they're going to invade other functions.

I think there's going to be, you know, when I started the group five years ago, we had for the first two to three years until we got to about 67 people in this community of, I've had a product.

We had one founder.

In the last 12 months, as we've gone to about 125, we have 14 founders, 14 people essentially have decided that their next job was not to take another product executive role, but to found.

Founding CEO is now open to us.

I have one person very senior person on in my group who interviewed for a CHRO position, because they wanted a product manager background for the CHRO position.

What is CHRO?

That's the chief HR person in the company.

So you would never think that an HR person would be a form of product manager.

But now, former leading companies are starting to say, hey, we need someone who can bring this obsolescence skill, this judgment skill, this empowerment skill, this builder skill to the function.

In fact, the function might be easier to learn than the other parts of the job.

And, you know, we're seeing that trend that product builders are going to have, you know, both a broader range of opportunities up and down the stack.

And it won't be product managers and engineers can become product leaders and product builders.

And all of this blurring of the lines is going to take place.

I think that, unfortunately, the flip side has to be mentioned.

I think that non-builders, and I think that anyone who sort of sees themselves is not loving, like sitting down and building something.

And there may be reasons why we'll get into why you may not be in a position to find the time, let's say.

But if you're not a builder, if you're like, look, my skill was never to, I'm not really in to tech.

Like people say this all the time.

I'm not really in a tech.

I just really found it to be a lucrative job.

It's a, you know, it's a role where my ability to communicate, my ability to move information was, you know, where I ended up enjoying it.

I love team build, you know, those kinds of notes, which by the way, I love all those things.

But if you don't love building stuff, you're in trouble.

And, and I mentioned about half the people are in that camp.

So we're going to have that challenge where they're going to have to find perhaps leave the tech industry.

They might have to, you know, it might be that they, you know, want to go build a new business outside of tech, but use some of these AI tools, or maybe they want to find a job completely foreign to tech.

But I think that this non-builder piece is a piece of a mirror image of the builder growth that story that we're saying.

There's so many directions that we can go here.

One thing I want to throw out, it's kind of a hot take.

And this came from a chat.

I just had it with a mold ahead of growth and growth that endthropic.

So he's at a growth.

He's a PM.

And he have this really interesting point that as engineers can do so much more, PMs are getting squeezed because they have to stay on top of so many things, so many future, so many ideas, so much dock, so many things being said to them.

And there's this push for PMs at companies to ship yards, build stuff themselves.

And what we took away from that chat is like the leverage that PMs often have is a lot higher, not spending time coding and shipping, but instead just like staying on top of all this stuff.

And he's like, you need more PMs now.

There's so much for PMs to do because it's so fast.

So there's still needs for prototyping to explore ideas and ideas and get feedback and a line, but he had an interesting take.

I don't want to be like, it's better.

I don't spend time shipping stuff.

It's better I do higher leverage work as a PM.

It depends what he means by shipping stuff because I think that if you have an engineering team of 50 people building things for your customers and you're like, hey, I want to be the 51st because that's how I get levers.

I'm like, it's kind of a cheap knockoff of an engineer.

If on the other hand, the thing that you're building is ways to stay on top of what the 50 people are doing, what in the past that was building tickets and backlogs and all of the things that we used to figure out, organizations, manage stand-ups, you know, that's the information overload that's happening.

What we saw when the CPOs got together is all of the things they're building are ways to drive efficiency out of their product organizations.

They're inside the building kind of development efforts.

And I'm not sure that for the next five years will continue to build software that way.

But I think in the next two people are going to change the product operating system that they're working on.

And we're already seeing companies that like stand up and they say, hey, we fully automated the way we do product reviews.

We fully automated the way we do product stand up.

So to his point, look, if there's 15, 10 times the amount of stuff happening, we need judgment to determine whether it's good.

These are good or bad changes.

And right now, if it's manual, we're cooked.

So it's a combination of hiring good product builders with judgment and then hiring increasingly folks whose entire job is to kind of build the internal tools necessary to improve the decisioning.

But it's not through hiring of humans and building management ethos, which is what it used to be in ZERP.

It's actually through technology, but it's a totally different way of building software.

And that's what gets people excited because they're like, wow, if I do this, I don't have to ever do a status report.

I mean, that was a comment that was made.

I hate doing status reports.

So now I just wrote something and my boss is happier because they get more into jail.

And that to me is incredibly exciting, but it is a different direction of what you're trying to deliver than something that goes out the door.

That is such a good distinction and it makes all the sense.

Basically, make yourself scale through software as much as possible.

There's a big opportunity and it's fun.

It's like you're building your own thing.

That's right.

That's right.

I think a few other things that I would just note around how things are going to change next couple of years.

I think that adults are still going to mean needed.

I think companies are going to grow that are going to grow quickly.

I think those that are driving some of these initiatives are classic founders.

And AI is great at supplementing a lot of things.

But I think judgment comes in the form of a combination of expertise and wisdom.

And so I think that increasingly I hear from my groups that, hey, I'm attractive to this company because I have wisdom, but I stay hands on.

I have credibility with the founder.

So I can have a conversation with that individual in his or her language.

But I have weight to my thinking.

I have seen the movie.

I have experience that actually would help them as they take this turn.

So adults are still going to be important.

I think pace will continue to go up partly because people will want to feed the beast, the sort of LLMs that are running at night.

And I think partly because there's just such an opportunity to keep moving so much faster.

And I think that's going to be dizzying and I'm not excited about what that causes for burnout.

Sadly, I think that geography and actually diversity is going to take a step back.

I think that we were very good about driving more as we grew the industry.

We started looking at people who were from different backgrounds to populate it, including different locations.

But I think that because the AI wave is so heavily and coming from the Bay Area and because companies are hiring fewer folks, they're hiring people that look and act like themselves.

So age, gender, I think, you know, ethnic backgrounds, all of those are taking a hit.

And I think that we will have step back wide a number of years in the diversity of what we do.

And so I worry, I mean, this is my personal worry, but I worry about that probably more now that I did in the last five years because I think it's an underbelly of what we're seeing.

And I don't think that anyone's intentionally doing anything.

But I think when pace is so high, the fact is that, you know, women are having kids in those power years and they just don't have the time to a lot, to spending their nights and weekends on the cloud code.

And so that's an impact.

And, you know, we don't talk about it as an industry, but it's absolutely true.

And then the last thing I would just say, and maybe this is, this goes into some of the that bias as well is I think that the one of the most surprising shifts we're seeing is, you know, your brands don't matter as much as how modern you are in your ability to deliver product.

And in the past, I think for the last 10 years, if I have you seen the movie before, and I'm, you know, in this last podcast episode we did, and we talked about, hey, brands matter, you really need to make sure personal brands.

Yeah, personal brands.

Hey, I've worked for this company, they've delivered products, they've been at scale, so then people are like, oh, that person certainly, we're doing, right?

And, and, you know, it's like, well, tell me about all the different experiences you've had.

But now, if every way of building software and how we deliver product is completely alien to how it was in the last, you know, 10 years, how you delivered in that sort of version one is going to be less and less relevant.

So lots and lots of feedback from that I'm hearing from interviews is like, put you in a scenario, what tools do you use, what's your judgeman, how do you think?

It's not about five years ago, you ship this thing, what was your thinking that went into it?

And so how modern you are now becomes the career advice, not did you pick up the established brands?

Because what if the established brands is very much working in a way that's not current?

You work there for six years, you come out and it feels like you're in a totally different world, right?

So that's why I think the next two years and these changes are so profound and and pretty quite frankly confusing to people.

That is such an interesting insight that the logo like used to be fancy to have all these logos in your resume.

And now you're saying sometimes that may hurt you because that company's not seen as a very AI-forward company.

And second of all, people are looking for just like, what if you actually don't, you're actually aware what's going on?

Well, I'm just going to say some of those biggest brands, it's hard to even talk about what you've done.

It's like, if you're working in meta and you spend two years and I managed to make this a piece of this algorithm go a little faster and by the way, it had a huge impact.

And frankly, it was incredibly hard to navigate the hallways and to make that decision and to find incrementality.

I mean, as someone who has worked there, I understand and respect that and that is a promotable achievement.

But it just falls very flat on a conversation where someone's like living in the future and product is now totally different.

So that distinction is the thing that I wanted to just call out that, hey, that's happening every day right now.

So it's your thing there, which is a really powerful point is that the skills that used to be really valued in product managers are changing pretty substantially.

Yeah.

And in fact, maybe almost flipped upside down in terms of importance.

In some ways, we start our careers as builders, many of us, and then we get taught that leverage scale, organizing, streamlined, empowering, enabling, don't do the build yourself, get others to do it.

Stop working on the core work on the factory, right?

That's that's the, that is the maturation of our industry.

And then you find out that what if it turns out the scale can be done very differently.

And all we care about is your opinion and what you build, that's very, very charming.

And that's what we're living through right now.

So let's follow this thread of specific advice to pms right now, whether they're mid career senior and started, what are some specific things that you think people should do to do well in this emerging future?

Change is really hard for us.

And I think as humans, we're not really designed to change very easily.

Like if you think about it, you know, I was thinking, you know, about why is it hard for us to change what in some ways change can lead us to much better outcomes.

You know, we're almost like told to change less as we grow older.

You know, when you're a kid, you fall down a ton, but like when you was last time you fell down.

Not often except my my son loves to pretend like we're falling.

So there's a lot of potential.

When you pretend fall, it's probably pretty dry.

It's probably relatively new.

Yeah, I think it's so fun.

He loves it.

But yeah, for me.

It's so fun.

It's so fun, right?

It's so long is down.

Yeah.

And I think it's funny because you watch kids and it's like normal for them to reinvent everything they do.

Oh, I'm learning to crawl.

Oh, now this walking thing, you know, crawling is not, that's not for me.

You know, it's why kids learn languages so quickly, because they are not afraid to make mistakes and they go through things much more rapidly.

It's why you teach your kids to learn how to ski early because boy, you know, I've just made a decision.

Hey, I've never been a skier and I'm just like told to do it.

I think that we are trained to find a happy medium and then make as few changes as possible.

Find a partner, get settled down.

You know, you find a job, try to stay.

It's a failure to transition to an your job if you can avoid it.

You know, that's our entire model.

And so we create also in some ways a mental block around this idea of reinventing oneself.

You know, when you are told to reinvent to when you are told to change, your first thing you think about is it really necessary.

Well, it seems exhausting.

I worked so hard to get here.

Why would I need to?

And I think in the most inner psyche of some of us, it's that just wasn't the deal.

The deal was.

I did what I was supposed to.

Went to school.

I worked hard.

I got a job.

I built a brand.

I got to be a manager.

I'm making the income.

I have the, you know, whatever it might be, the partner, the family, you know, all this stuff.

You're telling me, after all this time, I got to start over.

Like, it sounds fun.

You read Twitter and you're like, wow, these people are doing all this crazy stuff.

Then the back here, Mike, he's doing a why?

Why didn't we get here?

I don't, I don't want to do it.

I want to go back to the world where I can just keep doing things.

I think this block is actually at the heart of the matter today.

And it's just skill, reinvention.

And it requires time.

But time is so hard to find in your power years.

You know, for the reasons we mentioned with so many, you know, your goal when you're in your power years is to equally disappoint everyone in your life, which sounds like a horrible statement, but it's true.

You have to, you have six hours to give eight hours to give, 12 hours to give, and you have 20 hours of demand.

What is your prioritization mechanism?

I am going to equally disappoint everyone, not disappoint one, my parents will not be more disappointed than my kids than my health than my family than my friends and my partner, then my work, then, you know, my retirement account.

Like, that's essentially what your mind set is.

It's I need to equally disappoint everyone.

Now you're telling me that the number one thing is to reinvent when I'm barely able to manage this disappointment algorithm.

It's quite dark that I think that, you know, that does this set up.

And then the worst part is these two other psychological factors.

One is, okay, fine.

I'll put the week, I'll take a week off.

And I'll go figure out what people are doing and what the latest is.

And then it turns out three months later, that week off was, is now antiquated.

You got to keep doing it because the target keeps changing.

It's not like I went from not having a job to having a new job and then I kind of burned Grinden bear and got through it.

And now I'm back in flow.

It's like, I'm never in flow because I got to keep doing this over and over and over again.

And the the most surprising observation I made is that the ones that were the best at working in the past, the ones that mastered the old game, find it the hardest to go through this reinvention stage.

It's this sort of shadow, super power thing that I talk about.

You know, the better you are at mastering one system, the less likely you are to sort of recognize the new one because your entire world is like this is working to me.

And so the weaker you are, the more excited you are about changing.

Hey, what I'm doing isn't working, mine is well-changered, but if you're really good, you have no incentive to change.

And perhaps even your employer sees you doing great and the company itself is in this moment.

So all of these things, whether it's the shadow, whether it's the exhaustion, whether it's the time, whether it's the fact that the progress moving creates this reluctance to reinvent.

But the number one piece of advice stands your question is you have to have the courage, you have to believe you have to have the power to essentially say, look, I know the way we work is changing and I need to stay modern.

I need to stay current.

So I am going to cross that mental threshold and I'm going to prioritize that above all else.

That crossing that threshold is the key.

And I'll talk a little bit about how one does that, but I think that, I mean, if there was one thing to get away from today's discussion is every person listening to this podcast needs to find it in themselves to cross the threshold around embracing reinvention.

That is the world that we live in now.

Damn, that girl, this hits hard.

I told people, you don't trigger good stuff.

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What I think about as you talk about this is, um, and if you saw this, they asked all the heads of the AI labs, like Demis and Sam Alman, Darya just like, okay, if everybody agreed to slow down and stop this stuff, would you, would you do it?

And they all say, yep, which says a lot about just like they're all like freaked out a bit about how fast everything's going, how much is changing.

And then there's the reality of, but that is not going to happen because the the game theory, but all as it doesn't work, you can't slow down because no one will actually slow down, whoever doesn't as a huge advantage.

And so I think it's just a big part of this insight is just like this is happening.

And there's nothing you can do to slow it down or stop it and you can either try to pretend like it's no big deal and it's going to be all right or you can, as you said, get over this hump of just like, okay, I need to lean into this and see what I can do.

Well, and maybe there's a baby version of this that perhaps provides a bit more kind of solos and optimism.

A baby version of this is that, you know, the way that people did, let's call it product management back in the day when HP and Cisco and AMG and these other companies built products that were, you know, physical hardware, they had long engineering cycles.

There was a discipline called product management that was birth.

And that discipline had a very, very specific, very structured way of working that was essentially imploded when the internet companies came along.

And Google for one built the APM program because they felt like, hey, this product thing that exists in the market isn't really what we need.

And we're not seeing success.

And in fact, we're going to just train from beginning this new breed.

And, you know, that is then birthed a lot of the current product managers, Microsoft and met another big employer's kind of created a new version.

And for the first few years, there was it's very jarring because everything that they did that we they call product management, resemble old product management pretty much a name only.

And there wasn't like you go to become at a business school, you know, you get a business school degree in all of a sudden your product manager, you would have to work.

If you build some expertise, then you'd have to come in and help organize and collaborate and all this other good stuff.

The next couple of years are going to be like that, where, you know, every three minds, we're going to have more agents, different forms of judgment, they're blurring the lines on what the role of responsibility people from different backgrounds coming in, people leaving that it's going to be chaos.

But as a couple of years go by, things will settle.

Companies will be building a certain way and it won't be that you'll continue to change the way you're working, you'll have reached some form of optimization.

We're just not in that optimization in any way shape or form right now.

And so the speed of iteration and how you think about, look, my job is not to move information, my job is to evaluate.

And I have to think through what is successful, I think, whether this makes sense for the system, it's a totally different skill.

But after a couple of years, there's going to be some routineness to it.

There's going to be some training.

There's going to be consistency.

The job you had next is going to look like the previous job.

A lot of this is, so all I'm making a point is that you need to cross the threshold to stay modern because things are changing.

But I don't want to send the point that for the next 30 years you're going to be on this merit round.

That's going to spend faster and faster and faster.

And then you're just going to have to run off the merit round and go vomit in the corner.

That's not at all what I'm suggesting.

I'm just saying that right now is the moment when, if you love building, you have to stay current because you will be happier and you will be more relevant.

And if you don't love building, you have to recognize the industry's moving away from here.

That is the key point.

And I don't think there's a person that's looking at the current way of building prior.

Only there's a person that's been on this podcast that would disagree with that statement.

That is a really empowering point to make there that this was not forever, that it's a couple of years potentially maybe, I don't know, it could be a little bit longer, but it's not a forever thing where you have to do this.

You have to lock in and sacrifice forever.

This is the moment to get on the rocket, to get on the ship.

I don't know.

It's anonymous to the boat, whatever metaphor you want to use.

Whatever trash.

So I think that makes, that would make me feel better.

I think the other, like, I don't know, the good, again, just to remind people, like this, you know, there's a it sucks to have to change the good as you shared earlier.

Comp is never been higher.

There's a lot of open roles.

People that are embracing this are having a lot of fun.

Like, your, like, most pens are sitting there all day waiting for stuff to happen, waiting for meetings and approvals and all this linemen and all this PR view.

And now it's like, you can ship stuff so often.

Like, there's so much good.

And it's happening.

Maybe just remind us again of anything else there.

Just to inspire people to like, this is worth it.

Thank you, glad.

Let's go to the Bind of the visual you're describing.

There's someone who's sitting who are really afraid.

Who's a builder who's like, man, my job is changing so rapidly.

And I'm so nervous.

And I have to think through what's my career going to look like.

But I tend to ask the question like, do you really love your day?

Like, if you put green yellow and red next to the meetings you had and did that for a week and then we looked at the color chart, I bet you the vast majority of PMs that are in a product organization, they show mostly yellow and red.

And I'm telling you the ones that are moving into more of this build mode, it's mostly green and yellow.

And that yet, yet most of them are sitting very, very afraid, feeling stuck.

So what I'm suggesting is how do you then transition mentally and then physically into a moment of going from this moment of fear and being on the sidelines to being in the day?

What I have noticed this is sort of a big kind of surprise to me is, there is a moment where they experience the first joy in using the new tools.

Everyone has a story and it's always different but it's super personal.

It's going to be like, oh, I was doing it the certain way and then all of a sudden I built this thing and oftentimes it's like my partner and I use this app that I built or I built a chief of staff app to keep track of my inbox or I now manage the lights in my house using this thing and it's some silly thing and usually it companies with the story like and I stayed up all night or I spent a bunch of time talking to my friends or hack and away or I just spent time talking to plot about it.

You know, even my wife has a story about how she has this business that she's thinking through and she went from using the AI to, you know, do business plan to actually do test market and everyone has this moment of joy and then they're like, oh, it's like a they're they've caught a bug and at that moment is when they cross the threshold between fear to joy and joy is the biggest antidote to burn out and it creates opportunity because the moment you have joy the moment it doesn't feel like work and I think most product management deals like work if you're not building and we are now moving into a world where product management will be building and joy not work.

So you just need to find a path to get there and the moment you do your the rest of your human psyche creates time doesn't feel like you're disappointing others and builds energy because people have more energy than they realize they're just so exhausted by the not knew what was defined as product management and so that is the number one piece of advice is have you found joy.

Now there's a class a person who's like, no, this is joyful like I find the whole thing to be kind of boring nauseating.

I don't really like it.

I'm like, well then you're probably not in for the rest version of our industry and you should be respectful of that and you should be honest with yourself but there's a lot of product people that are right now very anxious that actually are going to be happier once they cross the chasm and all they need to do is find a way to create that moment of joy you know whether that's an app on the side of the app at your work and if you're a leader listening to this you should find those moments of joy in your staff because that's contagious and it gets people excited and that's what you know that's why I like doing what I do it's like I like building stuff and I caught the bug and you know I'm all there all the time you know I I try to find TV shows that I can vibe code in parallel too because well I want to watch TV but I want to be vibe coding at the same time.

It's like a show.

Let's look at show for my coding.

Well I a lot of it Amazon Prime shows are good.

I've got some time but they're built on books you know these books are like they're like structured and all that so you know Alex Cross or you know Jack Ryan you know what's hilarious is and you know when you get older you stop you remember shows that you love but you don't remember to plot so one time I just binge watch a season of 24 the show that I love when back in the day but frankly I watched it and I kind of knew what was going on but I vibe coded the whole time because it was like hey I'm paying attention here but I'm staying engaged.

Well it's actually follow this thread just like what's what's it what's your AI stack what are you using to build and what what are something what what's something you built and something you vibe coded.

I kind of am pretty all in on cloud these last three months I was for a month pretty aggressive on codex because I found some of their newer stuff to be especially the with sort of the highest level of reasoning to be to be quite advanced.

I find it hard to switch between tools I try to standardize to be to be direct look the things that I build I build a bunch of web properties for my community so you know anytime I see something that I can obsolete in code I try to build code around it so if you had a hundred people one natural thing you want people to do is to meet each other and you know a hundred people can't meet ninety nine other years so it's it's you have to be thoughtful around who's the best person to meet and how do you match people up how do you make sure that you match people with people that I've met before you know what are their halves or their ones that entire thing used to be me sitting down and thinking like oh you know Jason really appreciate meeting Annie but I don't know if they've met before now I write software to do that I read an agent that goes in and actually does match her I read an agent to figure out hey what are all the jobs that my head of products are hiring how do we make sure that we make those available but then build a mailing list of folks who I think when they're interested in work and you match up automatically so like the next generation of recruiting I think a lot about using AI for content so when I sit down I have an AI that takes questions from people and then it's trained on my content like here's and it gives answers but then I read those questions evaluate the answers and I'm like hey this is a theme I'm hearing and then I sit down and I write down when do the LLMs and I disagree I go through and so all of these things are anything that I'm doing that I think I can you know replicate I try to obsolete myself you know when I started my first job I asked the best engineer that I work with who still is one of the best engineers ever met what what's the what's the definition of a great engineer and you know I thought it would be like oh someone who's got this degree or is well versed in this technology stack he's like well the best engineer I know is my dad and you know of course this is before tech in that case and he's like and my dad's definition is still look my favorite which is an engineer someone who obsoleses themselves from everything that do that's the definition of a great engineer and I've taken that to every job that I've worked at and it's funny because you'll run into people that are like I don't know I don't want to obsolete myself that's my job and I was like I think if I obsolete they'll be a better job for me what AI is done has turned that you know has basically put me a pop on that if you can you can obsolete but just asking the AI is to do this for you so why I'm saying that is I my stack is what can I do to obsolete anything and everything I do on a daily basis that is super cool I love it I love hearing these stories like what I find is the best tactic here is just solve your own problem think about something that's not great in your day or something you just want to improve and just like and it's like it sounds so easy all you do is go to I don't know loveable or install cloud code download codex and just tell it I want to build the dashboard to control my sonus and then it just tells you like walks you through everything you need to explore and that's a pretty advanced thing to try but it's just like English like it sounds like I haven't known how to do this like you just tell it here's what I want to do just like a person and it helps you figure it out and well and I agree with you and then I think the question is like what skill do you have to have like for a while I was like oh that's a systems engineering skill because you need to be able to like train you know the AI is to go after things but I'm watching my wife and how she works and she's not an engineer but I mean she's getting tons of value you don't even need to be an engineer you just have to be opinionated or want you want to see and know what you want yeah no it no it good looks like and then the moment that you get it it's when the light bulb turns on when it wasn't working before and now you sit down and there's this moment where it's like hey I used to have to go and work to do this but now my agent service and then what's the next agent I could do to make my life a little bit better and that's where you catch the bug it's such a powerful thought that your job can be much more joyful as a product manager as any function but you know we're focusing on PMs just like if you look at your pie chart today of how much how happy you are during the day you can actually be much happier in this future and I think that's hard for people to like really think just realize oh wow okay I can actually love this job so much more it is not imagine that yeah and I think that it's because you're staring at change and I think change is such an alarm bell it's hard to hear the voice it says the thing that you are changing or the things you don't love because change is so hard for us that it's so scary you know and I respect that so I think that if your listeners are able to sort of understand that hey there is a world which is better but I have to go through the tunnel and the tunnel sucks and the tunnel may mean that I'm going to have to change jobs and me my prediction is the vast majority of people that are listening to this will be and a different job in the next five years because they will either choose to move to something because they will that company will struggle to stay modern just like we're describing people need to stay modern companies need to stay modern or their companies are going to be shedding and and re returning off staff and so because change is apparent I think it's just so deafening people are very much gunshot to be excited about something that's forced on them and you know let's be honest it's been forced on everyone and it's not something that they chose so that that's why I have a lot of empathy but when I talk to people I try to dig through forget what's happened and you know why how do we make the best out of it and the best it's pretty good so say we've convinced the listener okay I need to make a change I need a lean into this I need to take the seriously I can't just sit back and hope it all works out okay and then they maybe found a moment of joy they built something that's super cool and just like hey took the step what other advice you have for folks listening to help them be to sort of I don't know let's not say survive but just like thrive in this future that is emerging for product yeah I like thrive I definitely think that you know you find that moment of joy you have the engineering mindset which is hey I want to obsolete myself on something that I do today again reduce my the the less joyful parts of my job as a good starting point I think that you know you have to find ability to increase pace you know this is not a job this is the next two years requires a lot of fire in the belly a lot of agency that I don't know everyone talks about so for example if you were to leave a job and start a new job you probably don't view the new job your one at the same pace that you you know viewed your your five in your last job you need to kind of bring it if you have a new relationship you know and if you've come off of a long-term relationship my suspicion is your first year of that relationship you put your best foot on you this is what I'm asking you got to find that reserve you've got to make time you've got to maybe disappoint others in a way that you haven't in the past in order to create time for you to stay current find that joy obsolete yourself from the things that are are not worth it I think the other thing you have to do is you have to swallow your ego you know I don't want a single person saying hey I was an XYZ leader I would only consider roles at that same level I want people this is an extension of our last conversation it's not only is it invoked to be hands on and I see it's kind of a necessity I need everyone to sort of say look if everything's changing doesn't matter what we've done the past that brand doesn't matter as we discussed you have to have an egoless perspective of how to stay current and be not only willing but actually look for ways to even take something smaller in order to make sure that you're kind of going through the tunnel correctly and then ultimately part of the way we we we we swallow that he goes you stay long-term focused you say look if the way we build product is changing so aggressively my job is to spend the next couple of years being on the boat that's you know leaving this station and going to the new world once I get to the new world the cream rises to the top I'll take my skills my leadership and I'll go through it by the next few years if everything's changing I definitely want to be you know current and that means you have to have a long-term focus you know my properties called the skip of the community and everything they all kind would come up down to this word called the skip and I chose that word because the best word vise is always not thinking about the next move of the move after what's the skip job what's the skip opportunity well in this world it's not about what's the opportunity now and what's the journey it's about making sure that your skip opportunity is saved and you are able to get that high salary you're able to get one of those premier builder jobs and that's the world that you have to have in the mindset you have to have something you mentioned earlier was really interesting that in the next five years you predict that most people's jobs will be very different what are you managing there like well there's still be this product manager role well pms need to move closer to engineering what's kind of like the venn diagrams or spectrum you're seeing of where current pms may go yeah I definitely think that there's a world where pms go to every industry has the is what I would call the agents of change because the pms are the ones that can talk they're the ones that have the broadest view of the organization but they look at it through the technical lens and my hope is that most of our pms are the first to the tools and hence they're the change agents within their company so let's just play this out in the next year we start to see all these product organizations changing the way they build product and all of a sudden the way we build product is gentified and really really thoughtful and really for a long and then 12 months later the marketing the sales organization the each-back company that was bought by the private equity firm the school down the road you know everything's like boy we're just not a we're not current we're gonna get obsolete who do we bring in to be in charge of this change well you know this person works in the future we need to get to future so I'm like really bullish that product leaders are gonna be like you know like those like dandelion whatever you call exceeds when you blow it and then just go everywhere I have that vision meanwhile I think a lot of people going into product might be coming from design might be coming from data science might be coming from engineering because the ones that have judgment the ones that can talk the ones that want to stay current they might be like well I don't necessarily want to just stay in my lane I want to I have a point of view us to how this should work you know as you said from a designer point of view designers may have a lot of those skills and opinions on what it should look like maybe their platform won't be the pixels or the visuals they will be the product itself and they can adjacently move into product so I think you're going to see this crazy influx and then there's amazing you know kind of exodus and then you'll also see folks that are like I don't know if I can get in so I know that's a confusing kind of set of three changes but that's explains why so many people have anxiety is all three of these are happening instantaneously there's a line they thought they buried us they didn't know that we were seeds that I think of it I love that we're into a lot of the darker I'm speaking of that there's this hilarious tweet that just came out the other day that I have here where this guy describes the only four jobs that will remain in the future so the only four jobs that will exist in the future one is product engineer videcoder pmslop cannon number two is security s r e infra person number three is hot people which is like you know like getting people to buy your stuff customer service kind of like people the way this guy remember there are many ways to be I know that here's how they put it present that easy UX to the world is that category and then grownups which is your point just like adults yeah so yeah I think there's I read that I agree with that I mean I think the adults exist and I think anyone that's the top of their field that can talk and that's that essentially is opinionated I can go broad that's kind of the third point of so that's actually that would remind me so a mole that had a growth that anthropic made this really interesting point that so much of as time now more and more is alignment as a product manager and we were joking what's the harder alignment problem with lining people in a company or like a eyes a g i and and it feels like that's like a remaining and it's part of which you just subscribe somebody that can get shit done a change agent and a big part of that is like what a PM often is doing a lot of the time is like creating alignment internally around what we will be doing what we're purchasing that kind of thing yeah and I think that if you dissect what alignment looks like a lot of alignment was getting people the right information the ground level truth that problem is dramatically better that part of the job frankly just absolutely sucked whether it was the status report or put you know I I was on projects where there was like docs that were sent to me and then I would change the doc to then send it to my boss and then that boss would send it to someone and it was just like this movement of information where the ground truth was buried in some part of the organization and then there were like all these people that were putting on their spin that I think is changing but to your point now someone has to decide and someone has to have an opinion in what to fight for and that conversation is now much clearer to have because you know the ground truth there's less spin you know the CEO can literally ask their agent what is the situation what it houses performing what is this customer really want you know how does this affect the system you know is this really something that we want to change the product to enable so that conversation can happen but now people can like fight it out you know with with with with with real with real credence right and and if you're a product person that that really does have an opinion and wants to make a point you you have a forum so alignment will go away it's just it's not going to have as much theatrics and I think a lot of companies that are larger do have theatrics that I think the eyes are going to remove and I don't know of many p.m.

there's some that lived with the theatrics but frankly most of them are like this just seems like a freaking waste of time I mean it's so telling that 80% I bet you know this is the statement I'm 80% if you truly asked there you know you're pre-empt you really want that boss's boss job would you want their day not the pay not the credibility not the stature but you want their blood back to back meetings I bet you most of them will say no and what I'm suggesting to you is bad answers going to change the next two years what's really also interesting is as much as this role is changing engineering is changing even more and in my what I feel like is that the engineers that will continue to thrive or just are basically going to become more p.m.

me because the coding part is now going to be solved and now it's just what should we build is this great is this direction when I go is this going to what does it look like so if you're like oh shit my job is changing just imagine being an engineer right now and how crazy that must feel yeah and I think the one advantage that engineers have is they think in the systems and they think about it all the lessons more effectively so I think that you know when you make a change you have to decide is this change going to be sustainable in the product that you're offering I think an engineer is an edge there I think in the other edge they have is like I bet you we can build this to be more on it to be some or I think the miners he goes there yeah yeah so I think that every one of us like the product person probably has a little bit of an edge in judgment and communication engineers going to have a little bit of edge in the system scaling and how does this change affect folks the designers going to have a little bit of an edge with taste and all these things will still remain important and you know obviously people that have all of these will do better than those that have one or two but the industry is more than safe as evidence by the report that there's more hiring and I think and grow it's just a different class of the individual is what we're trying to communicate but design he's is really surprising to me the fact that there's data show that the number of design roles is plateauing and just how teams are just not valuing design as much as you think like you would think that design becomes much more important as the number of products grows exponentially that it's like a way to stand out to build something really beautiful and and and have a really thought-through experience and it's interesting that that's not happening right now also just I've been thinking about like like there's no world where I'm a great designer I can't just like use a eye and become a great designer unlike an engineer like maybe a PM I could become a much better PM with AI AI is knocking like it will you know do some cool stuff but I'm not ever going to feel like I am a great designer now so it's really interesting that design isn't more successful right now with the rise of AI and it might be that we just don't know what to make of design in this era you know that might be a piece of the other piece might be just like there's product builders and then you know product you know information movers and there's split up I think that there are pixel generators and then there are taste makers and I worried that in design maybe the industry itself conflicts design with more production and not with taste and so I think there's a lot of companies that you would talk to and even when they were hiring at a design they were thinking more around we need more production and great designers are much more taste makers and I think that is probably that bias is entering into the hiring plans in this era that we have today.

What a wild time we're living through an account holy holy moly.

Yeah isn't it funny that neither of us are operational there are days when I'm like man am I so happy I have the time to work on this and then other days that I think this is some of the most interesting like being operational right now is quite a ride and so there's good good and bad and you know COVID wasn't easy I mean there was a lot of challenges around you know working and seeing so much change so there's always something but this one this one's you know everything's being questioned and you know including how you how you define joy which I think is just absolutely fascinating Chaos is a latter as as the little finger famously said Nikela is there anything that we haven't covered anything else that you think is important for people to hear and either advice anything you want to double down on before we wrap up and get to a very exciting lightning room.

I would just say that there's a lot of room to be optimistic right now but you have to find it within yourself to recognize that there is a small period of change and exhaustion that's required to find that moment of joy and I just urge everyone to find those reserves to get there because once you do it's infectious but the longer you weigh the harder it is to cross that chasm and so I really want people to feel optimistic and find that moment of joy but I also recognize that there is a lot of activation energy that it takes to get there and so my hope is that you know there's a lot of people going through it and so you know there's some safety and numbers here but definitely I urge everyone to try their hand at at rethinking their craft and just to be clear you're seeing many people in the community doing well enjoying this thriving if this is possible yeah it's smiling exhaustion I see in my community everyone and before it was just exhaustion so I take smiley exhaustion over exhaustion but the pace is relentless I don't have any there's not that I can say this sugar could that point.

What is time to be alive?

Well Nikhil with that we reached our very exciting lightning room and we've got five questions for you are you ready?

Go go for it.

What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

You know Lenin I'm not a reader so I don't you know I don't I hate to admit this but I kind of vibe code instead of most consumption of code right now content right now you know all of the reading I do is like trying to stay up today and that was a casualty you know so I don't listen to as many podcasts I want to I don't read as much as I want to because I have so much information coming from the agents that I have deployed and all the stuff that's going on with we now on run Reddit and X and all that so I don't have a great set of book suggestions not unlike you know all your other all your other guests that are great at this you know they they read prolificly and you know I I just don't I mean I'll tell you I I read I don't know how much I loved it and I'll just leave it in here and case people are interested but I read this book called James which James is the story of Huckleberry Finn told from Jim's point of view I thought that was absolutely fascinating because anytime you take a classic and then you look at it through the eyes of someone else and what you realize is that story is quite powerful but you know very haunting and when you read Huckleberry Finn your kid so the distinction between seeing the innocence as not only the book was written from Queens perspective who was quite forward thinking by the way but you remember you were a kid at the time and now as an adult you see the book from another angle I thought that was interesting I don't know if I'd recommend it to your viewers but I thought I always look for things that I'm you know a natural stories that exists you know right in plain sight so that was an example of that I think somebody else has actually recommended that book so that's the second mention uh next question do you have a favorite recent movie or tv show you've already shared some spike coding favorites to be in the background anything else yeah I mean I think everyone's talking about paradise I I mean if you haven't watched the season one and season two it's all season two out and I didn't realize that he's going to just is almost wrapping up and I haven't watched his and two yet but you know it's a little apocalyptic in nature but it's absolutely fascinating character drama about how you know how people deal with you know very very challenging times and what motivates individuals the other one that I really like is lioness which is on paramount plus lioness is a story really about sort of a covert CIA group and how they deal with you know protecting security for america and importance and what it means to commit to a bigger cause I know that was a really well written show so both of those I recommend I do watch a 10 of television and and as I mentioned I vibe code to some shows and these two I don't vibe code too because that bit tension that's the new bar of some's great okay do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love could be an app could be a gadget could be something else my favorite product that I've discovered of late might be kind of obvious to a lot of folks but I you know I'm on a car guy so I'll just start by saying that though I've enjoyed kind of writing like doing new electric cars I just I'm not there's a large large number of people that love cars I love driving cars and you know talking about cars and repairing cars just like the opposite I mean I just want my car to be super reliable and I've had a Tesla for a really long time I'm out of less for just a long time and I've had it since pretty much they came out with them and they my daughter recently passed her driving exam and because she passed her driving exam uh one day my wife said hey you know we got to get her a car I was like we do I never actually could act like a dot that she's gonna be a drug car and I was like well when she could go and I mentioned I'm like okay well maybe we should buy her a car when she's not gonna drive them that maybe I should use this as an opportunity to upgrade my car and so I drove the latest Tesla's better out there and the ones with the self driving and the self driving works quite well just to be clear I mean I I've have it now for the last month and not 95 percent of the time myself drive but the most interesting thing is I had no idea that I actually have mild anxiety when I drive that goes away when I self drive and I had no idea and I my wife noticed it when we were driving up to the mountains one day and it was crazy snowing and I'm like we're gonna do it and she's like you are so anxious when you drive and I'm like I am because I've been driving since I was 14 years old because I grew up in Kansas and so I passed the test when you're I was 14 so I've been driving literally for nearly 40 years and I had no ideas I've gotten older that this pressing a button and going places and the cycle is just so awesome so anyway the reason why that experience is it's saying yeah there's the tech and all that it's just like I look for ways to reduce my anxiety anything that causes anxiety I try to eliminate and disappointed my life and this is one of them so that's a cool product for me I love that as a rule I've also become all in on self driving I've had it tough for a long time from the beginnings of their explorations into self driving and it was always just like I don't know this scary and now it's the opposite like my wife prefers I self drive even though I drive well she just like feel safer when the self driving is on and there's and there's this like in the actual settings they give you a stat of what percentage you're driving a self driving and they's noted it since 14.2 I think it was the release of like that so that was like the release that everyone started being like wow it's actually very good now and I don't think a lot of people realize that it's actually incredibly good like I haven't had a single concerning moment this is one of those examples in product where so many people try the previous versions that when you then tell your friend a lot of people have test laws obviously in California but in across the world when you tell your friends a lot of people are like oh yeah I tried and I turned it off so I think test those got this unusual challenge of getting people to turn it back on and obviously the newer harbours better than the older one of the new softer but once you go through one experience it can be hard to convince someone to try it again and that's an adage and product and just really applies here it's a downside of releasing really enough and sometimes people just have as memory would it might be I feel like I feel like this like Uber or you must have to just start hearing about it from your friends telling you hey I'm doing this thing I'm like wait really I guess I should try it yeah yeah yeah they aren't just like so here's a Tesla suggestion for anyone who's listening is Lenny and I should be able to give to 30 days for each of our friends of self-driving people that have turned it off because the referral of that that plus the endorsement allows people to experience it for free and then they can get their monthly subscription for it if that that that that viral plus enable man I think is a this is a gross tactic that you know they can have for free for us such a good idea by the way I love Matt Max mode I love that just the personality of the stuff just that are you a hurry mode McGye or you a standard mode gay I flip between him but I do feel like I'm hoping with the new release of the software keeps us in lane like I don't love it changing lanes but it's like we're trying to hurry a little bit yeah I wish I could just get it to go at a normal speed but also don't change lanes because I just don't like it just okay okay okay next question do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to you and work here in life my high school quote in my yearbook still is my motto which is genius is one percent inspiration 99 percent perspiration by Albert Einstein it's something that even an early age and you know it's not about genius being capital G you know I wasn't a New Year comment it was more like hard work is really what matters in life oh what's interesting is if you read that quote genius is one percent inspiration 99 percent perspiration through the lens of AI right it's absolutely fascinating because it turns out the AI will do the perspiration and limit question so I think what we're leading towards is we all need to moving to a world where we're all going to be inspired and it's the inspired individuals and all of us that will that will you know essentially continue to proliferate and don't worry about the perspiration but recognize that it is the perspiration that that is that is an necessity to make things go so I think it's an interesting quote especially in today's era final question people may have noticed that we've started collaborating on your podcast and your newsletter it's this it's such an under appreciated under I don't know scene thing that you do this podcast this newsletter it feels such a gap in in the content out there around product building of just like very tactical important non-sugar coded career advice for people in product and it's what I love about it is it's not AI most of the time in spite of this conversation we just had it's like very much like here stuff you need to know that is not flashy and shiny AI AI all the time so I want to give you a chance just to tell people about this the podcast the newsletter just what what the with ideas where they where they I started this property called skip because I really felt that there was a a death of content from operators sharing best practices with with emerging operators and the idea was look I had been a founder before I had been an executive before and I wanted to be in a position where I can say hey this is exactly what I experiencing this might apply to you and I noticed that most of the podcasts and content out there were from folks that hadn't spent as much time in operating more time in content and I was kind of the opposite then I started building this community that I spoke about last time which was you know about 23 at the time now it's over 125 had a products who are all kind of these builders top of their game and kind of reinventing what product management looked like and our goal is to collectively share our wisdom as operators to help people advance in career and that probably that calling is probably more important now that ever is everything is changing and so one of the things that we're launching next month with by the time that you know we end up launching this episode is something called skip.help where we have agents that have been trained on about 50 of our community leaders and so you can go and ask a question it might be preparing for an interview it might be a question around navigating either current environment it might even be you know how to build a chief of staff app and 50 of us not just me will respond and this is powered by our friends of Red Superme which is a great startup that actually by having these agents you get this sort of wisdom of the crowds and so those are the things that I I love and obviously the community itself is a very curated group and that's you know there's an infinite rate less a lot of people want to be in and I'm all in growing it slowly because I want to maintain trust but I do have this mailing list called skip.coach where we share our wisdom to a broader audience so I know I've kind of gotten every single domain name that starts with skip skip community skip shows my podcast skip coach give help but anyway I got any of them and you can try and go to tell them I always appreciate that I hear your support and your help and and building this property with me so it's been it's been great you know when I came on I don't think I had done my podcast yet and now I'm about ready to hit my 50th episode of your video inspiration and you're past 300 obviously and so you know it's fun to see how things change and and somehow how things happen so it's been great so fun I was going to ask you to share the domains which you did so it's skip.coach skip.community skip.show and then there's skip help business new ones skip.coach is launching around the time this goes out and then you'll save your sub stack I don't know if one of those takes you there but it's thus skipped out sub stack.coach.

Yeah yeah exactly the skip is the name of the podcast and news utter and skip show takes us to both.

Okay well thank you so much for being here this was exactly what is helping I feel like people are going to leave this feeling like okay I get it now I understand what I need to be doing.

I appreciate that and you know thanks for all you do for the community and for all the guests that you know you still have that I'm probably two dozen of the folks in skip that have been on the show where that will be on the show so thanks for supporting all of our efforts we're trying to help as many product builders as possible and that's a great journey to be on the other.

It is Nicole thank you so much for being here.

Thanks buddy thanks everyone.

Thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com.

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