Howie Liu: belief

Transcript context

…Do you see one of these roles, I don't know, being more in trouble than others, just like you need fewer of these people in the future potentially? I think overall you can get more done with fewer people, and that's not to say we want to go and make the team smaller, but rather ... the really cool thing for us and I think a lot of other companies is it's not like you have a finite set of things you need to do and execute on from a product standpoint, and okay, now I can do that with a 10th of people. I mean, you could do that in a lot of cases, but for us, maybe it's also because we're a very meta product, right? We are the app platform with which you can build now any AI app with AI, right? The apps themselves leverage AI capabilities at runtime, whether it's to generate imagery for a creative production workflow or leveraging deep research, or AI-based crawling of the web to search for companies that match a certain criteria for your Dealflow app or something like that. We can effectively leverage all of these other AI capabilities in this app platform, because by definition we're enabling our customers to build apps that have this wide range of AI capabilities. But because of that, it's like we have a almost infinite set of possible AI capabilities that we could execute on, right? I'm always telling the team like, "Look, the great news is it's like we have all these fruit trees and there's so many crazy low-hanging fruit, and you've got literally massive watermelons literally sitting on the ground and all you have to do is walk over 20 feet and pick it up instead of having to climb the really tall coconut tree to grab a hard coconut from 50 feet up. So there's so many watermelons on the ground, just go out and start finding the biggest ones and attacking those, right? " What that means is that if we can build this culture, and I do think it's a learnable way of operating, I really like to believe in the growth potential of any human and any individual. I think if you really have a growth mindset, and that's why one of our most important core values is growth mindset, right? If you really have that growth mindset, I think especially if you're willing to put in the nights and weekends hours, or in my case I'm literally telling people like, take a full day off, take a full week off and learn this stuff, you can become more fluent in this way. I think then what we get is a team that can just go and work on more things in a much more leveraged and fast way, right? So, I like to think people who are willing to jump on the train are just going to become more and more effective. It's not like, oh, as a PM my role is becoming entirely irrelevant, right? No, it means that as a PM you need to start looking more like a hybrid PM prototyper who has some good design sensibilities. By the way, I think some of the best eng PM and design cultures respectively over the past even few decades have always been multidisciplinary in nature, right? who has some good design sensibilities. By the way, I think some of the best eng PM and design cultures respectively over the past even few decades have always been multidisciplinary in nature, right? The original PM spec at Google required the PMs to actually be somewhat technical so they could understand the engineering limitations of the product designs they wanted to make, and they had to be kind of designy, right? I remember my co-founder, Andrew, when he was in the APM program was always reading books about design, even down to visual design and color theory and that kind of thing, right? So I think it's just a reminder that designers as well, some of the best designers through designer to Apple, including hardware designer, you have to understand some of the technical capabilities of how this stuff works, right? If you're an engineer, I think some of the best engineers and maybe Stripe always had a very good engineering culture of engineers who could think about the product and business requirements. In fact, on any given product group, at Stripe my understanding is that the DRI isn't always the PM as is traditionally the case in that triangle. Sometimes it's actually the engineer who's taking the product lead and saying, this is what we need to build.…

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