Diane Penn: belief

Transcript context

…Okay, this is great. I just had Andrew, he's the head of the Codex app at OpenAI, and you guys are aligned. PRD's not dead. Still very useful for specific projects and ideas. Great. Okay. We've closed the book on... PRD is still kicking. Okay. So we've been talking a bit about just what kind of skills are emerging for product people. Is there anything else that you find has shifted in what patterns are common across people that are doing well in this new AI world in terms of product managers and folks on the product teams? Is there anything else that you're like, okay, this is something you got to shift or something you look for more people? I think maybe specifically for folks who might be mid-career or folks who have been more in a managerial product leadership seat. One thing that I think I feel pretty strongly about is in order to be good managers of teams and PMs working with this technology, you have to be really hands-on yourself and have spent not just time tinkering, but actually shipping with this technology. And again, being in the details and sweating the tokens along with your PMs and your engineers and your teams. And so even for folks that I hire who have more tenured PM experience, the onboarding plans are exactly the same as somebody who is more early career. And it's around understanding users, reading consent and user feedback, talking to customers. I think there's something around being able to understand what to do with this, what good looks like, and having developed that in a very hands-on manner that's important. It's not necessarily easy for someone to agree or be able to see what a good or great AI product or AI feature could look like if they haven't kind of experienced building themselves. So I do feel pretty strongly that if you're a manager, you have to be hands-on; you have to spend a portion of your time actually shipping. You have to kind of walk in the shoes of your teams. And I always try to carve out a portion of time to actually own one to two work streams when we have models in order to keep my theory of mind, keep my sense of how the models are moving, how quickly it's improving, so I can help the team make decisions and make better decisions. So what I'm hearing here is no matter where you are in the ladder of hierarchy at a company, if you're not building yourself, if you're not actually talking to cloud, talking to Codex, building stuff, you're not going to make it.…

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