Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Great question. And I don't know that I know what it looks like everywhere. I think what it'll look like at Whatnot is it probably still looks mostly like it has historically, which is there are reasons that you would have a specialist designer, specialist engineers, specialist product management. I think those very concrete teams will largely be preserved for very specific projects or things that we have high confidence or conviction that we need to solve, or we're pretty high confidence conviction that we have a path forward on a thing and we want to make good progress. And I think at the edges around that, there's going to be a lot more free space for people to play on like, "Hey, I'm reasonably sure I can go and make a meaningful improvement to this thing." And it doesn't matter if you are a designer, an engineer, a product manager, a data scientist, you can and you should. If you're sitting there on a Friday afternoon and you can't focus on the POD you're writing, but you're pretty sure you can go and fix something, go for it. And so I think it probably doesn't morph in the more formal sense, but I do think there's just a lot more free space for people who are well-versed in the customer problems, well-versed in the code base, and understand some of that macro context. We'll just be empowered to do more and more things. Two and a half years ago, I had this post I put out where I said, "Why PMs are the best positioned role in tech to thrive in an AI world." And I feel like, even though the beginning of our conversation was like we should live in a world where we regret PM exists, I feel like we agree on this idea that the skills that seem to matter most and are going to be most valuable, whether it's a PM doing them or an engineer or designer, is very PM-y skills. I'll share a few examples from this post. Who is really good at this stuff, these things? Identifying what to build, distilling, communicating requirements, prioritizing everyone's ideas for the highest ROI opportunities, giving feedback and design to improve impact, developing go-to-market strategy, understanding business strategy. To me, this is what PMs do, and it feels like that's becoming more and more important. So I guess the question to you is, would you agree with this idea that the PME skills seem to be the most valuable now as AI takes on the building? Definitely agree. Also props for bringing in the receipts even with a timestamp, my friend. Well done. I think my only build on that would be to say I think those core PM skills aren't necessarily the things that we have rewarded PMs for over the last five years, versus storytelling, alignment, strategy. And so I do think you're 100% correct that can I genuinely understand the customer? Can I genuinely understand the business? Can I genuinely understand the tech? And can I translate the three together for optimal efficiency, is the point of leverage when doing things gets cheaper, trying things is cheaper, et cetera. So absolutely agree that product skills are probably the most durable. My build would just be there's a lot of people who have the title PM who haven't spent a lot of time building those skills in the last five years, but have gotten really good at communicating frameworks to leadership. And so I just kind of push us back as a function into that core work.…

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