Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…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 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 grinned and 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 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 superpower thing that I talk about. 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, might as well change it." But if you're really good, you have no incentive to change, and perhaps even your employer sees you're 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 target's moving, creates this reluctance to reinvent. But the number one piece of advice, to answer 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 the 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. Nikhyl, this hits hard. I told people you don't sugarcoat stuff and this is what we're experiencing now. I am so excited to tell you about this season's supporting sponsor Vanta. Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like Cursor, Ramp, Duolingo, Snowflake, and Atlassian earn and prove trust with their customers. Teams are building and shipping products faster than ever thanks to AI, but as a result, the amount of risk being introduced into your product and your business is higher than it's ever been. Every security leader that I talk to is feeling the increasing weight of protecting their organization, their business, and not to mention their customer data. ... their organization, their business, and not to mention their customer data. Because things are moving so fast, they are constantly reacting, having to guess at priorities, and having to make do with outdated solutions. 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And so I think there'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 could either try to pretend like it's no big deal and it's going to be all right. Or you could, 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 solace and optimism. A baby version of this is that the way that people did, let's call it product management back in the day when HP, and Cisco, and AMD and these other companies built products that were physical hardware, they had long engineering cycles. There was a discipline called product management that was birthed, 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 the beginning this new breed." And that then birthed a lot of the current product managers, Microsoft and Meta and other big employers started to create a new version. And for the first few years, it was very jarring because everything that they did that they call product management resembled old product management pretty much in name only. And there wasn't like you go to become a business school, you get a business school degree and all of a sudden you're a 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 years are going to be like that where every three months we're going to have more agents, different forms of judgment. They're blurring the lines on what the role and responsibility, people from different backgrounds coming in, people leaving the... It's going to be chaos. But as a couple of years go by, things will settle. Companies will be built 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 does success look like, whether this makes sense for the system. It's a totally different skill. But after a couple 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. 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 spin faster, and faster, and faster, and then you're just going to have to run off the merry-go-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'll be more relevant.…

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