Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Well, and one of the things that's so important about our design team and our design culture, one of the things that we try to do is there is no gate to showing me work every week. So there is no ... Any idea, it doesn't matter how good people think it is, how bad it is, you can bring it to that design meeting, get it on the list and share your work and your idea. And that is so important because I think to your point, sometimes people over-rely on this critique process and great ideas get filtered out. And so I think creating this culture on the team where you can bring anything to the design meeting, there's no filtering process, I think is just so important. You mentioned AI, how designers are shipping code. I have a friend who works at a big tech company and you just said all the design team, they're required to ship like, I don't know, 10 PRs a month or something like that or a quarter, which is such a new world. I guess one is just like, how do you think about designers shipping code? Is that like just do it if you can or is there a requirement sort of thing? And broadly, I'm just curious how AI is changing the way your team operates. What are just a few things that have been impactful in how your team operates that are AI driven? Taking a step back, it's definitely not a requirement to ship code on the design team, but I think people are so passionate and curious about learning new things. I mean, one of the things we've always tried to do on the design team is just figure it out. I remember in the early days of some of the 3D graphic stuff that we were trying to do, one of our team members had never done 3D graphics before. And they're like, "Okay, let's just figure it out." So they took some online tutorials and boom, we were off to the races. So I think the design team has always been really flexible in terms of their curiosity, learning new things. And so I don't think you have to push people or create a requirement or something like that for folks to want to adopt new tools and want to ship code. I think the big question now that everyone and anyone thinks they can submit a PR is like how we don't break things at a billion or nearly a billion user scale, right? That's really important. So I think what we've really tried to do is also develop AI tools and guardrails to make it easier for more people to participate and submit code, but also reduce the likelihood that we're going to have some sort of bug. So we've got automated code review now. We've, I think automatically detected like close to 10,000 bugs at this point probably. We have a system at Snap where on the internal version of the app, you can shake to report your problem and agents now debug exactly what happened, what went wrong and can actually suggest a fix. And I think in pretty short order it'll be implementing the fix as well, which is pretty crazy. So I think taking a step back, there's so much excitement around the way that AI is going to change the way that companies work. Obviously software companies in particular, like ours, I think are on the cutting edge of the way that AI is changing how things get built and what gets done. We really wanted to bring some order to that chaos. And so the way that we did that was really by starting with the jobs to be done for our community and our advertisers. So getting really, really basic and straightforward on, okay, for Snap-chatters, our jobs to be done, it's as simple as like get people to download the app, get them to add their close friends, get them to, I don't know, use lenses, something like that. On the advertiser front, right? It could be bringing people into the ad platform, configuring their campaign, et cetera. And so by listing out all these jobs to be done, really for the community journey and for advertisers as well, it became very clear where we could use agents, where we needed to be very focused in terms of building cross-functional teams around those jobs supported by AI tools. And it's also given us, I think, a really helpful mechanism to track our progress against the business outcomes for each of those jobs.…

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