Lenny Rachitsky: observation

Transcript context

…Yeah, that's right. If you don't do it, somebody else is. I think that's also what all the major media publishers are really contending with right now. I guess I need a licensing deal with New York check. Anyway. Okay. I want to go on a totally different tangent. We weren't planning to talk about this. I know that I said this, we're going to be fully focused on this one topic, but there's something you mentioned to me before we start recording that I think will be really interesting to a lot of people. You guys at Reforge are now building actual SaaS products that people can buy. It's not just courses. I don't know if people know that, but let's make sure people understand this. There's actually products for product teams, so maybe just explain that briefly, but the thing that I think is really interesting here is you work with a lot of companies now selling them AI tools, and you have noticed a very big difference between the companies that are really good at adopting AI tools and seeing gains from them from those that don't. Talk about just what you see there, and because this is in theory going to be really helpful to companies that are struggling with adopting AI tools and seeing gains. Just to quickly explain that transition so it makes sense for people, which is, I started Reforge just with the interest that there was all these incredible leaders out there growing on the front lines of some of the fastest growing companies and they have all this amazing knowledge and I wanted to encode it in useful and practical ways for others. That took the form of courses and content and product, all that kind of stuff at the beginning. Along the way, everybody kept asking us to essentially build the tools to implement what we taught. Because with anything, you can learn as much as you want. You can listen to my podcast, your podcast, Lenny, whatever, as much as you want, but if you don't actually put it into action and implement it, then it's not really going to create value. People kept asking us to really close that gap and we said no for the longest time. And then about a couple of years ago when AI really started to inflect, it really created this moment that, oh, wow, now there's this opportunity not just to encode this knowledge into content, but also into the products, the software, the tools that we use ourselves. So we started to take a really big bet on that and started to develop this new platform for AI-native product teams. The first product we launched is called Reforge Insights, which acts like your AI product researcher, aggregates all the feedback from all the sources, uses AI to analyze it, helps you explore it, but also will start to identify what are the gaps, the things that you don't have in your feedback today and auto-generate the research to go gather all those new insights, so complete the full cycle. We're going to launch two other major products as part of this platform before the end of the year, but we'll save that for some future episode. So that's been our journey. We've seen inside companies that are going through this transformation from two perspectives. One is obviously selling in that tools, but the other perspective is, for 10 years, companies have been coming to us to help them try some sort of transformation with our learning product. Most companies are not coming to us to just throw a bunch of courses in front of, they're trying to solve some big business problem, some transformation. Now that used to be things like, we've got to figure out this growth thing, or I'm going from sales-led to product-led, or I have more project managers and I need to transition to product managers, something like that. There's some business problem, they're going through some transformation and they saw us as part of that transformation and we got to partake in quite a few of those types of transformation. Now of course, the transformation that everybody's going through is, okay, how do I become more AI-native? How do I adopt this stuff? We've seen a pretty wide spectrum and from both perspectives of how companies are approaching this.…

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