Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think there are many things AI is changing and AI will change even if ... What did I work on 24 years ago or how did I do product management 24 years ago is different than product management today. The way we write PRDs, the way you do designs, the way you make decisions, the fact that you have access to data today didn't really exist 24 years ago. The only data that you had was surveys and those surveys took six months to run and for data to come back. And now we have instrumentation and telemetry and everything that we ship and we can analyze data. So I would say things have definitely evolved. With AI, things are just going to change even more rapidly. I'm already seeing on a weekly basis we are introducing a new way of doing things and if you look at a typical product cycle all the way from doing market research and user research to writing the first draft of a PRD to doing the first draft of Marks, doing user research and even storytelling that we talked about, how do I actually tell the story about my product? AI is making all of that much, much easier. And I think that transformation is going to happen very fast. What has not changed in those 24 years is you having to understand what your end users want. And I know that's kind of the cliché of product management. "Yes, of course I have to understand what my end user wants." I think it is harder than we think. I think it takes more than we typically do to actually really get your finger on the pulse of what your end user feels. And I think that that has stayed constant. I think that is the holy grail, not just to understand one archetype of an end user. At Uber here, not only are we operational in 75 different countries, even in a single country like the US, we have different kinds of end users, whether it's demographics, whether it is socioeconomic status, and for us to internalize what do end users want, AI will definitely speed it up, but for a product manager, it is going to stay constant. The one thing I do think product managers need to be aware of is the importance of knowledge is going to stay, it's going to continue, but the importance of judgment and as you mentioned product sense and the gut feel that is going to become even more important in the world of AI. As a result of that, we need to increase that or reduce that cycle time even more so we can develop that product sense and judgment. Sort of along those lines, there's a question I got from, I don't know if he's the CTO of Uber, CTO of part of Uber, Praveen who I believe you work with at Uber. Yeah.…

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