Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yep. Okay. You mentioned AI. Amazing segue to my next topic that I want to spend some time on. You built a tool called ChatPRD. My guess is it's the single most popular AI PM-specific tool out there, other than some big company's tool like, I don't know, Sprague or Figma or something like that. First of all, just what is ChatPRD, and then why did you build it? Yeah. ChatPRD comes out of, again, pace setting. And I'll actually tell you the real genesis of ChatPRD, which is at a previous company we had a quite technical product we needed to build. We're scrappy and resource-constrained, and our platform PMs were working on something very important, but this was critical and we needed to get it done. And we didn't really have a platform technical PM to spec this thing out. And it was quite complicated. And I raised my hand and I said, "I'll IC this. I think I know what we need." And between the beginning of the meeting and the end of the meeting, I had used ChatGPT and a prompt to come up with a very serviceable PRD spec for this very technical product. And I took that prompt and that long-running ChatGPT thread and crafted the Claire version of a product leader or product person that could, with really solid consistency, output product specs, give good feedback, build out plans, build out tracking mechanisms and goals. And so while I say, "She may just be a prompt, but she is prompt," this was lovingly crafted over several months. And so when the GPT Store came out, for my team I just said, "Hey, you all know I've been writing PRDs with ChatGPT." I created a GPT and just gave it to my team. I was like, "Here, you can use this if you want it." And they really liked it, and other people started asking about it and I eventually ran into the monetization and access wall that is the GPT Store right now. And so I've also been having a lot of fun coding again, and so I thought, this is easy. We're just going to stand up a standalone app and wrap, come on, it's a wrapper, it started as wrapper, wrap some of these capabilities and just publish it and put a fairly reasonable price tag on it and see what happens. And now, I have thousands of people using ChatPRD. Every day, people are creating dozens of specs and PRDs every month. It's everything from, "I'm an engineer on a team with too few PMs and I get blocked, so I'm going to build my own requirements," to, "I'm a solo founder and I need to put some structure on my thought for my team," to, "I'm a PM and this has saved me truly hours of work to get the basics of my product requirements done so I can spend time on the details." And then I've added on more functions and capabilities than the standalone app. It is my personal product copilot that I've released for the world.…

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