Nikhyl Singhal: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. So I think that would make me feel better. I think the other, I don't know, the good, again, just to remind people, it sucks to have to change. The good, as you shared earlier, comp has never been higher. There's a lot of open roles. People that are embracing this are having a lot of fun. Most PMs are sitting there all day waiting for stuff to happen, waiting for meetings and approvals and all this alignment and all these PR reviews. And now it's like you can ship stuff so often. There's so much good that is happening. Maybe just remind us again of anything else there just to inspire people to like, "Okay, this is worth it." I think let's go to the individual you're describing. There's someone who's sitting, who's really afraid, who's a builder, who's like, "Man, my job is changing so rapidly and I'm so nervous and I have to think through what's my career going to look like." But I tend to ask the question like, "Do you really love your day?" If you put green, yellow, and red next to the meetings you had and did that for a week and then we looked at the color chart, I'll bet you the vast majority of PMs that are in a product organization, they show mostly yellow and red. And I'm telling you, the ones that are moving into more of this build mode, it's mostly green and yellow. And yet, most of them are sitting very, very afraid feeling stuck. So what I'm suggesting is how do you then transition mentally and then physically into a moment of going from this moment of fear and being on the sidelines to being in the game? What I have noticed, and this is sort of a big kind of surprise to me, is there's a moment where they experience the first joy in using the new tools. Everyone has a story and it's always different, but it's super personal. It's going to be like, "Oh, I was doing it a certain way, and then all of a sudden I built this thing." And oftentimes it's like, "My partner and I use this app that I built," or, "I built a chief of staff app to keep track of my inbox," or, "I now manage the lights in my house using this thing. " And it's some silly thing. And usually accompanies with a story like, "And I stayed up all night," or, "I spent a bunch of time talking to my friends or hacking away," or, "I just spent time talking to Claude about it." Even my wife has a story about how she has this business that she's thinking through and she went from using the AIs to do the business plan, to actually do test market. And everyone has this moment of joy and then they're like hooked. It's like they caught a bug. And at that moment is when they cross the threshold between fear to joy and joy is the biggest anecdote to burnout and it creates opportunity. Because the moment you have joy, the moment it doesn't feel like work. And I think most product management feels like work if you're not building. And we are now moving into a world where product management will be building in joy, not work. So you just need to find a path to get there. And the moment you do, the rest of your human psyche creates time, doesn't feel like you're disappointing others and builds energy because people have more energy than they realize. They're just so exhausted by the monotony of what was defined as product management. And so that is the number one piece of advice is, have you found joy? Now there's a class of person who's like, "None of this is joyful. I find the whole thing to be kind of boring, nauseating. I don't really like it." I'm like, "Well, then you're probably not in for the next version of our industry." And you should be respectful of that and you should be honest with yourself. g, nauseating. I don't really like it." I'm like, "Well, then you're probably not in for the next version of our industry." And you should be respectful of that and you should be honest with yourself. But there's a lot of product people that are right now very anxious that actually are going to be happier once they cross the chasm and all they need to do is find a way to create that moment of joy, whether that's an app on their side, other app at your work. And if you're a leader listening to this, you should find those moments of joy in your staff because that's contagious and it gets people excited. And that's why I like doing what I do, I like building stuff and I caught the bug and I'm all there all the time. And I try to find TV shows that I can vibe code in parallel to because I want to watch TV, but I want to be vibe coding at the same time [inaudible 00:58:07].…

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