Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Ambition Is the New Bottleneck

1 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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Lenny Rachitsky and a co-host discuss why remembering to use AI tools like Codex is harder than it seems. They argue that a PM's real job is raising teammates' ambitions: asking if projects could be bigger, faster, or more ambitious to lift what the team thinks is possible.

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The hardest part is just remembering to even try, just to be like, oh yeah, well, let me see if Codex can do this for me. It's just like a new habit, a new like thing we have to build in our brain.
I think elevating others' ambitions or reminding them of what's possible here is a huge part of the product management role. Tyler Cowen has this statement on his site, which is that most people underrate the impact of going to someone else and saying, hey, what is like the more ambitious version of what you're doing? Or couldn't you try this? Or couldn't you try this at a 10x bigger scale? And in some ways, again, when I think of what do PMs do that is incredibly effective now, or what can they do that is incredibly effective now, when folks say, hey, I think we can get this done in this way, or we can get this done by this timeline, or maybe this is the first version of it, part of your job now is to elevate everyone's ambitions and say, actually, isn't the possibility ceiling meaningfully higher? Shouldn't we be more ambitious about what we're attempting here? Or couldn't we try this faster?