Why half of product managers are in trouble | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google)

The skills that used to be really valued in product managers are changing substantially.

It's going to be chaos. Our industry is very much in stress. Nothing's constant. Everyone's in a state of alert. If you talk to product leaders 3 years ago, their day was largely moving information. The information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur.

I just did this report on the job market. Interestingly, we have the most open PM roles globally in 3+ years.

This is a complete renaissance. For the product industry, but it comes with a lot of strings attached. In the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to see massive shedding of staffs and then massive rehiring. You might see a company shed 30,000 and hire 8,000, but the 8,000 people are going to all be AI first. The builders are going to have the time of their lives, but if you don't love building stuff, you're in trouble.

What are some things that people should do to thrive in this future that is emerging?

You have to find ability to increase pace. You got to find that reserve. The next 2 years requires a lot of fire in the belly.

Today, my guest is Nikhil Singhal. Nikhil is, in my opinion, right now, the number 1 best source of career advice for product managers and for tech people in general. He was a longtime exec at Meta and at Google, CPO at Credit Karma. He's also a 4-time founder, and he leads the best community out there for heads of product and chief product officers called the Skip community. He also has a larger community for tech professionals called the Skip Coach. And through these communities and his 30 years of building consumer products at scale, and also his podcast, which I've recently partnered with, he is constantly gathering and meeting with and speaking with top product leaders around the world about what's happening and what's changing in the lives of product managers and tech workers in general. And the answer is a lot. This is an episode that every single product person needs to listen to, and you won't find a more real talk and actionable overview of what is going on and where things are heading in your career and also what you should be doing about it right now. Seriously, do not miss this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's Product Pass for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Nikhil Singhal. Nickel, thank you so much for being here and welcome back to the podcast.

Yeah, thank you, Lenny. I appreciate version 2, and all my notes were like Lenny version 2, so I'm quite excited about being back on the show. You've done so well since the last time that I visited and appreciate the opportunity to share with you my current thing.

Yeah, so you were actually one of the launch episodes, the first 20, 30 guests that I had on the podcast. This was 2 or 3 years ago, something like that. And a lot has changed in the world of product management since then. And we're going to be basically spending this entire episode talking about what is changing in the role and the career of a product manager. And what I especially love about you, talking to you and hearing your insights, is you don't sugarcoat what's going on. You're very real about like, here's what you need to know about what is going on. So we're going to be talking about the good and the bad and just like a lot of advice for product managers in particular. To kick things off, give us just kind of the big picture view into what is changing for product managers, the good, and then maybe the scary stuff.

Yeah, it'd be a lot shorter of an episode if we just talked about what didn't change. Wow. I think maybe I'll start with this. I think that when we first chatted, it was like in maybe the end of COVID I think. The ZIRP era, as we called it, zero interest, you know, kind of free money from investors was just kind of cresting. We talked about how ICs are now more in demand. We talked about how these first round of layoffs are existing, that ex-growth companies are gonna be a struggle. But if you really talk to product leaders that were kind of in that mode, maybe 3 years ago, they weren't very happy. And what I mean by that is their day was largely a day of moving information from one to another. Let me frame the way that my team is presenting the information to my boss so that that person can frame it to their boss's boss. And generally the function had become extremely focused on responsibility without authority. And so that is the greatest form of workplace stress. Now, we don't talk about that. We talk about all the stresses that we have today. Boy, AI is going to replace our function, etc., etc. But the honest truth is, if you think back, if you've been in product for a handful of years, that was a tough time. Now, people were being paid well. Layoffs were just starting. The industry was huge. It was the biggest it's ever been. There were more product managers, more CPOs than ever existed in history. What's changed is people are having fun again, particularly product folks, because they're able to build. They don't have to rely on as many people to have impact. There's much more of a direct connection to their ideas and their ability to test and, and, and connect their product instincts to their customers. And so in many ways, this is a complete renaissance for the product industry. For a lot of the strongest builders in the group that I'm associated with, compensation is at an all-time high. They have more offers than they've ever seen. They see their next job maybe being a founder, maybe being a CEO, maybe being in another function other than product, but being in the C-level. They're feeling like there's more opportunities than ever before. So that's kind of the good. I would say, you know, honesty, it comes with a lot of strings attached. I think that it starts with just being exhausted. I have, I've never seen an industry that's more tired than they are now. I mean, I think we were tired during COVID but for different reasons. Now I think nothing's constant. There's, you know, once you figure out how to do your job, in the past you would be fine for a decade until you became a manager, and then you would be fine until you became an executive. Now, if you don't stay up in the next 3 months, they'll be like, oh, you're, you're doing that thing that we stopped doing that 3 3 months ago. We don't do that anymore. Oh, you know, PRDs? Well, you know, that's not even a problem. You know, everything feels like everyone's in a state of alert. And I think that in addition, now you're hearing like tens of thousands of people are being shed by larger employers that are also hiring and paying triple wages. So like, that's like mind-boggling. But you know, depending on your perspective, you might be on one side or the other. And I think that particularly a lot of the mid-career people, people that are like, let's call it in their 30s, you know, life plays this cruel trick on you where you end up having your best, most energetic years of your career, your power years of career, because you finally have figured out what you're doing. But at the same time, you may be settling down, you may have kids, your parents are aging, and you for the first time have those aches and pains in your body. You have to think about diet. You can't eat cookies every day. You have to exercise. And so between your health, the family and friends that you hardly ever see, your parents, which are now worrying because you have to build a different relationship with them, they're becoming dependents, your actual dependents, which are your kids. And then, oh, by the way, your work, which is you know, will take whatever time you have, but it also changes all the time. That generation is insanely stressed historically. And now we're like, hey, stay up, you know, what's the latest in cloud code? They changed it this morning. I, it's, it's dizzying. So I think there's joy, but there's fatigue in a way that I haven't quite seen before.

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I think that how people would describe it and how I describe it is slightly different. I tend to be more around like when people are doing better, I think they have more choice and they're long-term going to be happier. From that perspective, I think people that are at the top of their game are doing much better. For the reasons I mentioned, they're just more interested in their jobs. I think that they're more stressed, but I think they're stressed because they wish they had more time to feed the LLM at night, which is a different form of stress than the stress that they experienced in the past, which is, I don't know if my point or my team is going to get through the, the malaise of decisioning that exists here. So I think that people are doing better. However, I think our industry is very much in stress. I think that on average, people, even if they're doing well, they feel more stressed because they worry they're either not keeping up or they worry that this industry is going to change and it's going to essentially, they'll be roadkill along that way. And so that has a lot to do with, you know, people are not, you know, generally that arrogant and they don't always believe that everything's going to work itself out and there's a lot of evidence that things are changing. And so change is hard on humans. And so I think that there's a combination of both, but I think the best people tend to be feeling great right now.

We're going to talk about, of the people that are doing best, what are they doing differently? But before we get there, let's think about the future of where things are heading. You talked about a bunch of the things that are, have already changed and how different the world of product management is. What do you think will change further in the next couple of years to give people a sense of where things are heading?

Yeah, I had this meetup last Thursday and it was a fun meetup. You know, I have a group of about 125 heads of products and we tend to gather once a month in San Francisco. And during this meetup, you know, we took an approach where lots of people were building things for their own companies or on their own to help themselves with productivity. And so we said, hey, why don't we do a show and tell? Why don't we just have you, if you're a head of product, just show kind of things that are interesting, that are worth, worth, worth explaining. And so we had a startup go up and show what they're doing. And then we had some mid-sized companies and some late-stage companies. And you know what, it was a few things that were really palpable. One was there was so much joy in the audience that people were like, oh, I've been building this thing and let me show you. And everyone had their laptop and they were like one-upping each other and they're like, your chief of staff does that, my chief of staff does this thing. So that sort of builds on my point that people are having fun being hands-on. But the second thing is that the way they talk about how product decisions are made, the way they talked about how prioritization is determined, the way they talked about how information moves within the company, looked like a completely foreign animal from anything that I had experienced when I was working, you know, a few years back. And I got up on stage and I said, you know, if you think about how we work right now and how you folks are all talking about, you know, using agents in your enterprise, how you're using chief of staff apps to essentially drive more productivity, how all of you are essentially spending all your time just focusing on judgment and you're spending all your time taking anything that can be obsoleted and writing software around it. I think none of that was even in the language, even in the vernacular 12 months ago. So now what is it going to look like in 12 months? And everyone kind of had a pause and they're like, yeah, this was sort of, you know, it was impossible to anticipate what this conversation would look like 12 months ago. It's pretty hard to understand where things are going. But, but I would say I think maybe I'll answer your question around where things are going in the next couple of years. Based on kind of how I think companies are going to change and how people are going to change. So I think on the company side, I think that, and then maybe I'll slant it more towards product for a second. So product leaders will increasingly get paid and be asked to drive judgment and then be the tip of the spear on trying to essentially obsolete everything else through software, through AI, through agents. And this is partly why there's a lot of excitement, because just to be very honest with you, and you were a PM and I was a PM, most of the stuff that you didn't like doing are the things that AI is really taking a real, uh, crack at. And so, um, I think that's super interesting. Uh, I think that there's a ton of that change that's going to happen. Some companies are doing it now, some companies will do it, but within 2 years, I think most of these companies will obsolete all the mechanical parts of building product, I think that there will be 10 to 100 times more changes that will be presented to products than ever before, because now the cost of testing something, the cost of changing is going to be much, much lower. And so when things are changing that rapidly, that judgment piece becomes like pretty much paramount.

Just to make sure we understand, when you say judgment, what do you What should people be thinking of when you, when you talk about judgment?

I think that it's sort of evaluating whether the thing that we're changing is a good or bad thing. I think that it's also evaluating whether, you know, we should change the product in one way versus another. You can't build 100 custom versions of the same product. It doesn't— it affects your brand, it affects the maintainability, etc. So when customers are asking for things, when you're trying to think through how do you build something that's sustainable, differentiated, That's judgment. And evaluating whether it's successfully met that criteria and whether it's worth building and worth releasing, it's almost like the system skill that's existed from the beginning of the internet. It's, you know, hey, it's not about the feature, it's around the system that we're putting together, the platform, if you will, that's, you know, kind of enabling capability, right? So that's the judgment of, boy, there's all these changes coming in, they're gonna happen more frequently. You know, as an aside, because of all these changes, I think that in 2 years, I think there won't be any more bad software. I mean, this is maybe more of a wish and a dream than a prediction, but I think that if you count in the week, in your given week, how much bad software you come back with, right? You know, I have a house and it has like 15 different apps that run. To control everything from the shades to the air conditioner to the, you know, garage door. And almost every one of those apps are horrid. They don't work particularly well. They never get monitored. Things break, you know, and never checks it. Like, all that stuff's going to get fixed because someone's going to basically sit down and tell Claude to fix it, and it's just going to fix it and it's going to fix it. It's going to be more secure. So I think that that's changing. And so people will have a lot less tolerance for, for bad software.

Along those lines, just real quick, a quick aside to your side, uh, the prompt I constantly find myself using with Codex and Claude is just, how can we make the product experience better? How can we make this better? And you just ask that and it's like, here's 10 ways we can make it better. And so he is like, wow, these are really good ideas. And then cool, do it, do, do the first 7.

Exactly. There's gonna be like some super skill that's gonna run against every piece of software that's in, in the App Store. And it's gonna basically go in and it's gonna fix 'em all. And then they're gonna get released and they're gonna be like, oh, that, there's just like, just a significantly more consistent, better, less buggy experience and more maintainable. And so that's why there's a lot of optimism, right? Because there's, these changes can be done pretty automatically.

Yeah. Just like, it's easy to just to kind of finish that loop real quick. Like so many of these apps are built by engineers that are not the best engineers. They're engineers that, you know, like, companies hired that don't really care about their software. They're just like, this is just like a side thing, building this thing that we have, just app. We just need to build an app. Let's find someone to build it. They're not like product-first companies. And now all of these companies have access to the most skilled software engineer, Claude Code, Codex, and all these other tools. So I totally see what you're saying. Like everyone has the best engineers available now. And it's just the English to ask them to build the better thing or build a better app. So, that's a really interesting point.

It still boggles my mind. You know, everyone's like, oh, what's the cutting edge and all that. I mean, I think there's still, I don't know if this is true even today, but very recently there were more lines of COBOL than I think any other language out there. And mainframe sales continue to do pretty well and they're unusually large line item for companies like IBM. And part of the reason why these systems like You know, I think I spent an hour and a half trying to get my MileagePlus account on United to work correctly with my daughter's phone and all this other stuff, partly because these systems are so complicated, but they're built in mainframes, right? And a lot of the engineers— and this is going to sound kind of morbid, but, you know, I think it's true— is a lot of the engineers are dead. Like, they literally are passed away. They were written, you know, 10, 20 years ago. And, and like going in and touching that code is, you know, the probably the last thing anyone wants to do. So nobody goes in there, you know, it's all downside. Now we can change that. So I'm like very excited about what it means to go in and improve things that people take for granted, right? That, that's a big one. That's a bit of an aside. I think that, um, The other thing that I think is worth kind of signaling is I think that the way we, we, the skills that you need to be effective in today's world is a, is an acceleration of what we were talking about last episode. We were talking about ICs, we were talking about hands-on, we were talking about opinion even back then before, you know, Claude and ChatGPT and others kind of came, came out. I think what we're now seeing is companies are looking very, very carefully at their staffing and they're asking themselves, one, do we need this many people? Did we overhire? And part of the reason is they're looking, hey, maybe we doubled our staff in the last 5 years. Lots of companies that are public have done that. Did we get twice as much for them? You know, it was funny when I was at Google, um, now over 10, 15 years ago, we used to ask ourselves, you know, I was on an ancillary team. I wasn't in the search or the ads team. We used to ask ourselves like, how many people are really needed for Google to hit their numbers? And, you know, there would be like at the time, 20, 30, 40,000 people. And, you know, if you ask someone who wasn't in tech, you're like, ah, probably like 90% of those folks, obviously. And, you know, the answer is probably closer to like 9%. You know, probably you need like 500 people to keep the lights on and to build that business. You don't need 25,000, 30,000, 40,000 people. So there's a huge amount of overhead where companies hire not just because they want to, you know, have bureaucrats, because they want to expand, they want to try new things. But I think that there's a judgment day that's come back. Where companies are like, look, we aren't getting as much for the staff that we grew in the last 5 years, and this AI thing requires a totally different skill set. The combination is going to mean this year, I predict, in the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to see massive shedding of staffs and then massive rehiring. But the re— you might see a company shed 30,000 and hire 8,000. But the 8,000 people they're going to hire are going to all be AI first, and the 30,000 they're going to let go of are going to be in combination of we didn't get as much for those folks that we needed, and we wanted to sort of set the— we want to set the, uh, the destination differently with a much lighter payload. And that's, that's dark. That's going to make this, uh, year and the next two years, you know, you're going to be pretty, pretty challenging. So I'll transition a little bit to my thoughts on people, but I'll pause for a second to see if this resonates with you.

That's scary to hear. We're going to talk about what folks listening can do to be— to do their best to be in that second bucket of being rehired and kept, because there's a lot you can do and there's a lot of people that know they need to change and adjust and they're not doing anything. And we want to talk about maybe some of the blockers there. One thing I'll note is I should have mentioned this earlier. I just did this, uh, report on job, the job market. And interestingly, as of today, at least, we have the most open PM roles globally at tech companies, uh, in 3+ years. The last time it was this high was kind of during COVID basically. So there's some good news there, at least for the PM role. I don't know.

Did that surprise you, Lenny?

Yeah, it did. Because there's always this sense that, you know, why do we need PMs? What's the point? We have AI, just build stuff. And like my sense, I've always been saying this, I feel like the PM skill is the most important, valuable skill of all the skills. And I know every role thinks this about their role. It's like, no, design, we design more than anything now. Like, but, but I feel like what you said where it's the deciding what to build, deciding if this is good and great and ready and prioritizing, I feel like that's what remains. So, so to me it makes sense.

Your report came out in a fortuitous time because it was right before I was preparing to kind of come on the show. And there are the 3 points I was going to make is, you know, builders are going to have the time of their lives. Comps actually up and the Bay Area is, you know, essentially back in, in, in, in favor. And I think those 3 things came very much loud and clear in your report. And I think your, the question around, hey, why are product managers doing so well? Why are there so many jobs when in reality a lot of product people that all of us know are struggling to find a role or we're hearing about these layoffs? I think it depends on how you define what a product manager is. And I think that for the first time, I think that we did have a dramatic shift in what's defined. We 3 years ago talked about, hey, product managers, there's lots of archetypes. Some archetypes are actually more in favor. This was the IC conversation, the builder conversation. Now what we're essentially saying is the information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur. And I think about half of the product people that were kind of big grew into the industry, you know, have that skill and superpower. And then there were a set of people who got into product because they like to build stuff, you know, and, you know, folks like yourself who were founder, who that was sort of the motivation into joining kind of the industry, and then they found themselves into this thing called product management. Those ones are builders, you know, and those people are the ones that are being hired by your survey. I think those product managers, everybody wants a builder. And I think that interestingly, lots of engineers are builders, lots of designers are builders, lots of marketing folks are builders. And I think builders wanted is going to be the big tagline for the next couple of years. And it is so fun to build. I, I'll bet you, and this is a prediction, that if you had to choose between preparing a podcast and sitting in Codex or sitting in Cloud Code and like working on your laptop, you would prefer the latter.

It is. I mean, yeah, just like progress. You just make so much progress. Like, look at this thing go. It's getting better. Yeah.

I mean, when I was a PM, I used to take a break and go change the light bulbs in the house. And the reason why I would change the light bulbs is that light bulb was broken, but then I replaced it and the light came on. And man, was that satisfying. Because in a product job, there is very few days of satisfaction because you don't really have the ability to see something broken that gets fixed. It's just part of the challenge in having responsibility without authority. Until now. Now. You can participate in the joy. You can create a design. You don't have to wait for the designer and convince the designer to go and actually work through this or to put your stuff on a backlog. You don't have to do that. And so I think that the builders are going to have the time of their lives, and I think they're going to be very focused on judgment. I think that they're going to invade other functions. I think there's going to be, you know, when I started the group 5 years ago, We had for the first 2 to 3 years until we got to about 60, 70 people in this community of, of head of products, we had one founder. In the last 12 months, as we've gone to about 125, we have 14 founders. 14 people essentially have decided that their next job was not to take another product executive role, but to found. Founding CEO is now open to us. I, I have one person, very senior person on, uh, you know, in my group who interviewed for a CHRO position because they wanted a product manager background for the CHRO position.

What is CHRO?

That's the chief HR person in the company, right? So you would never think that an HR person would be a former product manager. But now, forward-leaning companies are starting to say, hey, we need someone who can bring this obsolescence skill, this judgment skill, this empowerment skill, this builder skill to the function. In fact, the function might be easier to learn than the other parts of the job. And, you know, we're seeing that trend that product builders are going to have, you know, both broader range of opportunities up and down the stack, and it won't be product managers, and engineers can become product leaders and product builders, and, and all of this blurring of the lines is gonna take place. I think that unfortunately the flip side has to be mentioned. I think that non-builders, and I think that anyone who sort of sees themselves as not loving, like sitting down and building something, and there may be reasons why, and we'll get into why you may not be in a position to, to find the time, let's say. But if you're not a builder, if you're like, look, my skill was never to, I'm not really into tech. Like people say this all the time. Oh, I'm not really into tech. I just really found it to be a lucrative job. It's a, you know, it's a role where my ability to communicate, my ability to move information was, you know, where I ended up enjoying it. I love team building, you know, those kinds of notes, which by the way, I love all those things. But if you don't love building stuff, you're in trouble. And I mentioned about half the people are in that camp. So we're going to have that challenge where they're going to have to find, perhaps leave the tech industry. They might have to, you know, it might be that they, you know, want to go build a new business outside of tech, but use some of these AI tools, or maybe they want to find a job completely foreign. To tech, but I think that this non-builder piece is a, is a sort of a mirror image of the builder growth, that story that we're seeing.

There's so many directions we can go here. One thing I want to throw out, it's kind of a hot take, and this came from a chat I just had with Amol, the head of growth at Anthropic. So he's head of growth, he's a PM, and he had this really interesting point that as engineers can do so much more, PMs are getting squeezed. Because they have to stay on top of so many things, so many features, so many ideas, so much doc, so many things being sent at them. And there's this push for PMs at companies to ship yards, build stuff themselves. And what we took away from that chat is like the leverage that PMs often have is a lot higher not spending time coding and shipping, but instead just like staying on top of all this stuff. And he's like, we need more PMs now. There's so much for PMs to do because engineers are So fast. So there's still need for like prototyping to explore ideas and ideate and get feedback and align. But he had an interesting take that like, I don't want to be like, it's better I don't spend time shipping stuff. It's better I do higher leverage work as a PM.

It depends what he means by shipping stuff, because I think that if you have an engineering team of 50 people building things, for your customers and you are like, hey, I want to be the 51st because that's how I get leveraged. I'm like, eh, it's kind of a cheap knockoff of an engineer. If on the other hand, the thing that you're building is ways to stay on top of what the 50 people are doing, when in the past that was building tickets and backlogs and all of the things that we used to do to figure out organizations, manage standups, you know, That's the information overload that's happening. What we saw when the CPOs got together is all of the things they're building are ways to drive efficiency out of their product organizations. They're inside the building kind of development efforts. And I'm not sure that for the next 5 years we'll continue to build software that way, but I think in the next 2 years, people are gonna change the product operating system. That they're working on. And we're already seeing companies that like stand up and they say, hey, we've fully automated the way we do product reviews. We fully automated the way we do product standup. So to his point, look, if there's 15, 10 times the amount of stuff happening, we need judgment to determine whether it's good. These are good or bad changes. And right now, if it's manual, we're cooked. So it's a combination of hiring good product builders with judgment and then hiring increasingly folks whose entire job is to kind of build the internal tools necessary to improve the decisioning. But it's not through hiring of humans and building management ethos, which is what it used to be in XRP. It's actually through technology, but it's a totally different way of building software. And that's what gets people excited because they're like, wow, if I do this, I don't have to ever do a status report. I mean, that was a comment that was made. I hate doing status reports. So now I just wrote something and my boss is happier because they get more detail. And that to me is incredibly exciting. But it is a different direction of what you're trying to deliver than something that goes out the door.

That is such a good distinction and makes all the sense. Basically, it's make yourself scale through software as much as possible. There's a big opportunity and it's fun. It's like you're building your own thing.

That's right. That's right. I think a few other things that I would just note around how things are going to change the next couple years. I think that adults are still going to be needed. I think companies are going to grow. They're going to grow quickly. I think those that are driving some of these initiatives are, are classic founders, and AI is great at supplementing a lot of things, but I think judgment comes in the form of a combination of expertise and wisdom. And so I think that increasingly I hear from my groups that, hey, I'm attractive to this company because I have wisdom, but I stay hands-on. I have credibility with the founder, so I can have a conversation with that individual in his or her language. but I have weight to my thinking. I have seen the movie. I have experience that actually would help them as they take this turn. So adults are still gonna be important. I think pace will continue to go up partly because people will want to feed the beast, the, the sort of LLMs that are running at night. And I think partly because there's just such an opportunity to keep moving so much faster. And I think that's going to be dizzying, and I'm not excited about what that causes for burnout. Sadly, I think that geography and actually diversity is going to take a step back. I think that we were very good about driving more breadth. As we grew the industry, we started looking at people who were from different backgrounds to populate it, including different locations. But I think that because the AI wave is so heavily and, you know, coming from the Bay Area and because companies are hiring fewer folks, they're hiring people that look and act like themselves. So age, gender, I think, you know, ethnic backgrounds, all of those are taking a hit. And I think that we will have stepped back quite a number of years in the diversity of what we do. And so I worry, I mean, this is my personal worry, but I worry about that probably more now than I did in the last 5 years because I think it's an underbelly of what we're seeing. And I don't think that anyone's intentionally doing anything, but I think when pace is so high, the fact is that, you know, women are having kids and in those power years and they just don't have the time to allot to spending their nights and weekends on cloud code. And so that's an impact. And, you know, we don't talk about it as an industry, but it's absolutely true. And then the last thing I would just say, and maybe this is— this goes into some of the advice as well, is I think that one of the most surprising shifts we're seeing is, you know, your brands don't matter as much as how modern you are in your ability to deliver product. And in the past, I think for the last 10 years, it's like, have you seen the movie before? I remember even in this last podcast episode we did, Lenny, we talked about, hey, brands matter. You really need to make sure— like personal brands, your personal brands. Hey, I've worked for this company. They've delivered products. They've been at scale. So then people are like, oh, that person. Certainly knows what we're doing, right? And, and, you know, it's like, well, tell me about all the different experiences you've had. But now, if every way of building software and how we deliver product is completely alien to how it was in the last, you know, 10 years, how you delivered in that sort of version 1 is going to be less and less relevant. So lots and lots of feedback from that I'm hearing from interviews is like, put you in a scenario. What tools do you use? What's your judgment? How do you think? It's not about 5 years ago you shipped this thing. What was your thinking that went into it? And so how modern you are now becomes the career advice, not did you pick up the established brands? Because what if the established brands is very much an working in a way that's not current. You work there for 6 years, you come out and it feels like you're in a totally different world, right? So that's why I think the next 2 years and these changes are so profound and, and quite frankly confusing to people.

That is such an interesting insight that the logo, like, used to be fancy to have all these logos on your resume. And now you're saying sometimes that may hurt you because that company's not seen as a very AI-forward company. And second of all, people are looking for just like, what have you actually done? They're actually aware of what's going on.

Well, I was just going to say some of those biggest brands, it's hard to even talk about what you've done. You know, it's like, you know, if you're working at Meta and you spent 2 years and I managed to make this, you know, piece of this algorithm, you know, go a little faster. And by the way, it had a huge impact. And, you know, frankly, it was incredibly hard to navigate the hallways and to make that decision and to find incrementality. I mean, as someone who has worked there, I understand and respect that. And that is a promotable achievement, but it just falls very flat on a conversation where someone's like living in the future and product is now totally different, right? So that distinction is the thing that I want to just call out that, hey, that's happening every day right now.

So what you're saying there, which is a really powerful point, is that the skills that used to be really valued in product managers are changing pretty substantially.

Yeah. And in fact, maybe almost flipped upside down in terms of importance. You know, in some ways we start our careers as builders, many of us, and then we get taught that leverage, scale, organizing, streamline, empowering, enabling. Don't do the build yourself, get others to do it. Stop working on the car, work on the factory, right? That's, that's the, that is the maturation of our industry. And then you, find out that, well, what if it turns out the scale can be done very differently and all we care about is your opinion and what you build? That's very jarring and that's what we're living through right now.

So let's follow this thread of specific advice to PMs right now, whether they're mid-career, senior, getting started. What are some specific things that you think people should do to do well in this emerging future?

Change is really hard for us. And I think as humans, we're not really designed to change very easily. Like, if you think about it, you know, I was thinking, you know, about why is it hard for us to change when in some ways change can lead us to much better outcomes? You know, we're almost like told to change less as we grow older. You know, when you're a kid, you fall down a ton. But like, Lenny, what was the last time you fell down?

Not often, except my son loves to pretend like we're falling. So there's a lot of pretend fall.

And when you pretend fall, it's probably pretty jarring. It's probably relatively new.

Yeah, for him it's so fun. He loves it.

But yeah, for me, it's so fun, right?

Such a long ways down.

Yeah. And I think that it's funny because you watch kids and it's like normal for them to reinvent everything they do. Oh, I'm learning to crawl. Oh, now this walking thing. Yeah, crawling is not— that's not for me. You know, it's why kids learn languages so quickly because they are not afraid to make mistakes and they go through things much more rapidly. It's why you teach your kids to learn how to ski early because, boy, you know, I just made a decision. Hey, I've never been a skier and I'm just like too old to do it. I think that we are trained to find a happy medium and then make as few changes as possible. Find a partner, get settled down, you know, find a job, try to stay. It's a failure to transition to a new job if you can avoid it. You know, that's our entire model. And so we create also in some ways a mental block around this idea of reinventing oneself. You know, you, when you are told to reinvent, to, when you are told to change, your first thing you think about is, is it really necessary? Boy, it seems exhausting. I worked so hard to get here. Why would I need to? And I think in the most inner psyche of some of us, it's, that just wasn't the deal. The deal was, I did what I was supposed to. Went to school. I worked hard. I got a job. I built a brand. I got to be a manager. I'm making the income. I have the, you know, whatever it might be, the partner, the family, you know, all this stuff. You're telling me after all this time, I got to start over? Like, it sounds fun. You read Twitter and you're like, wow, these people are doing all this crazy stuff. But in the back of your mind, it's like, I just don't know why. Why did we get here? I don't, I don't want to do it. I want to go back to the world where I can just keep doing things. So I think this block is actually at the heart of the matter today, and it's a skill reinvention and it requires time. But time is so hard to find in your power years, you know, for the reasons we mentioned with so many, you know, your goal when you're in your power years is to equally disappoint everyone in your life, which sounds like a horrible statement, but it's true. You have to— you, you have 6 hours to give, 8 hours to give, 12 hours to give, and you have 20 hours of demand. What is your prioritization mechanism? I am going to equally disappoint everyone, not disappoint one group. My parents will not be more disappointed than my kids, than my health, than my family, than my friends and my partner, than my work, than my retirement account. Like, that's essentially what your mindset is. It's, I need to equally disappoint everyone. Now you're telling me that the number one thing is to reinvent when I'm barely able to manage this disappointment algorithm. It's quite dark that I think that, you know, that there's the setup. And then the worst part is these two other psychological factors. One is, Okay, fine. I'll put the week, I'll take a week off and I'll go figure out what people are doing and what the latest is. And then it turns out 3 months later, that week off was, is now antiquated. You gotta keep doing it because the target keeps changing. It's not like I went from not having a job to having a new job and then I kind of grinded and got through it. And now I'm back in flow. It's like I'm never in flow because I got to keep doing this over and over and over again. And the most surprising observation I made is that the ones that were the best at working in the past, the ones that mastered the old game, find it the hardest to go through this reinvention stage. It's this sort of shadow superpower thing that I talk about. You know, you've the better you are at mastering one system, the less likely you are to sort of recognize the new one because your entire world is like, this is working to me. And so the weaker you are, the more excited you are about changing. Hey, what I'm doing isn't working, might as well change it. But if you're really good, you have no incentive to change. And perhaps even your employer sees you doing great and the company itself is in this moment. So All of these things, whether it's the shadow, whether it's the exhaustion, whether it's the time, whether it's the fact that the target's moving, creates this reluctance to reinvent. But the number one piece of advice to answer your question is you have to have the courage, you have to believe, you have to have the power to essentially say, look, I know the way we work is changing and I need to stay modern. I need to stay current. So I am going to I'm going to cross that mental threshold and I'm going to prioritize that above all else. That crossing the threshold is the key. And I'll talk a little bit about how one does that, but I think that, I mean, if there was one thing to get away from today's discussion is every person listening to this podcast needs to find it in themselves to cross the threshold around embracing reinvention. That is the world that we live in now.

Damn, Nikhil, this hits hard. Uh, I told people you, uh, you don't sugarcoat stuff and this is, this is what we're experiencing now. I am so excited to tell you about this season's supporting sponsor, Vanta. Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like Cursor, Ramp, Duolingo, Snowflake, and Atlassian earn and prove trust with their customers. Teams are building and shipping products It's faster than ever thanks to AI. But as a result, the amount of risk being introduced into your product and your business is higher than it's ever been. Every security leader that I talk to is feeling the increasing weight of protecting their organization, their business, and not to mention their customer data. Because things are moving so fast, they are constantly reacting, having to guess at priorities, and having to make do with outdated solutions. Vanta automates compliance and risk management with over 35 security and privacy frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA. This helps companies get compliant fast and stay compliant. More than ever before, trust has the power to make or break your business. Learn more at vanta.com/Lenny. And as a listener of this podcast, you get $1,000 off Vanta. That's vanta.com/Lenny. What I think about as you talk about this is, um, I don't know if you saw this, they asked all the heads of the AI labs, like Demis and Sam Altman and Dario, just like, okay, if everybody agreed to slow down and stop this stuff, okay, would you, would you do it? And they all said yep. Which says a lot about just like, they're all like freaked out a bit about how fast everything's going, how much is changing. And then there's the reality of, but that is not going to happen because the game theory of it all is it doesn't work. You can't slow down because no one will actually slow down. Whoever doesn't has a huge advantage. And so I think it's just a big part of this insight is just like, this is happening and there's nothing you can do to slow it down or stop it. And you could either try to pretend like it's no big deal and it's going to be all right, or you could as you said, get over this hump of just like, okay, I need to lean into this and see, see what I can do.

Well, and, and maybe there's a baby version of this that perhaps provides a bit more kind of solace and optimism. A baby version of this is that, you know, the way that people did, let's call it product management, back in the day when HP and Cisco and AMD and these other companies built products that were, you know, physical hardware. They had long engineering cycles. There is a discipline called product management that was birthed, and that discipline had a very, very specific, uh, very structured way of working that was essentially imploded when the internet companies came along. And Google, for one, built the APM program because they felt like, hey, this product thing that exists in the market isn't really what we need and we're not seeing success. And in fact, we're going to just train from the beginning this new breed. And, you know, that then birthed a lot of the current product managers. Microsoft and Meta and other big employers started to kind of create a new, new version. And for the first few years, there was— it was very jarring because everything that they did that they called product management resembled old product management, pretty much in name And there wasn't like you go to become a business school, you know, you get a business school degree and all of a sudden you're a product manager. You would have to work, you'd have to build some expertise, then you'd have to come in and help organize and collaborate and all this other good stuff. The next couple years are going to be like that where, you know, every 3 months we're going to have more agents, different forms of judgment. They're blurring the lines on what the role and responsibility people from different backgrounds coming in, people leaving. It's going to be chaos. But as a couple of years go by, things will settle. Companies will be built a certain way, and it won't be that you'll continue to change the way you're working. You'll have reached some form of optimization. We're just not in that optimization in any way, shape, or form right now. And so the speed of iteration and how you think about, look, my job is not to move information. My job is to evaluate. You know, I have to think through what does success look like, whether this makes sense for the system. It's a totally different skill. But after a couple years, there's going to be some routineness to it. There's going to be some training. There's going to be consistency. The job you had next is going to look like the previous job. Lots of this is— so all I'm making a point is that you need to cross the threshold to stay modern because things are changing. But I don't want to send the point that for the next 30 years you're going to be on this merry-go-round that's going to spin faster and faster faster, and then you're just going to have to run off the merry-go-round and go vomit in the corner. That's not at all what I'm suggesting. I'm just saying that right now is the moment when if you love building, you have to stay current because you will be happier and you'll be more relevant. And if you don't love building, you have to recognize the industry is moving away from you. That is the key point. And I don't think there's a person That's looking at the current way of building product. I don't think there's a person that's been on this podcast that would disagree with that statement.

That is a really empowering point to make there that this is not forever, that it's a couple of years potentially, maybe, I don't know, it could be a little bit longer, but it's not a forever thing where you have to do this. You have to lock in and sacrifice forever. It's a, this is the moment to get on the rocket, to get on the ship. I don't know. It's anonymous, the boat. Whatever metaphor you want to use, whatever transportation. So I think that makes, that would make me feel better. I think the other, like, I don't know, the, the good, again, just to remind people like this, you know, there's a, it sucks to have to change. The good, as you shared earlier, comp has never been higher. There's a lot of open roles. Uh, people that are embracing this are having a lot of fun, like you're, like most PMs are sitting there all day waiting for stuff to happen, waiting for meetings and approvals and all this alignment and all this PR reviews. And now it's like you can ship stuff so often. Like 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, uh, 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? Like 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, 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, 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 is 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, you know, the lights in my house using this thing. And it's some silly thing. And usually it accompanies with a story like, and I stayed up all night, or I spent a bunch of time talking to my friends, or or hacking away, or I just spent time talking to Claude about it. You know, 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, you know, do business plan to actually do test market. And everyone has this moment of joy, and then they're like hooked. It's like they've caught a bug. And at that moment is when they cross the threshold. Between fear to joy. And joy is the biggest antidote 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 and joy, not work. So you just need to find a path to get there. And the moment you do, you're— 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. Like, 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, you know, 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, you know, whether that's an app on their side or the 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 what, you know, that's why I like doing what I do is like, I like building stuff and I caught the bug and, you know, I'm all there all the time. And, you know, I, I, I try to find TV shows that I can vibe code in parallel to because I wanna watch TV, but I wanna be vibe coding at the same time.

What's a good show? What's a good show for vibe coding?

I think, well, I, a lot of the Amazon Prime shows are good. That's not a knock on Amazon Prime, but they're built on books. You know, these books are like, they're like structured and all that. So, you know, Alex Cross or, you know, Jack Ryan, you know, what's hilarious is, and you know, when you get older, you stop, you remember shows that you love, but you don't remember the plot. So one time I just binge watched a season of 24, the show that I loved when back in the day. But frankly, I watched it and I kind of knew what was going on, but I vibe coded the whole time because it was like, hey, I'm paying attention here, but I'm staying engaged.

Wait, let's actually follow this thread. Just like, what's, what's it, what's your AI stack? What are you using to build? And what, what are something, what's something you built and something you vibe coded?

I kind of am pretty all in on Claude these last 3 months. I was, uh, for a month, pretty aggressive on Codex, um, because I found some of their newer stuff to be, uh, especially the, with, with sort of the highest level of reasoning to be, to be quite advanced. I find it hard to switch between tools. So I try to standardize to be, to be direct. Like the things that I build, I build a bunch of web properties for my community. So, you know, anytime I see something that I can obsolete in code, I try to build code around it. So if you had 100 people, one natural thing you want people to do is to meet each other. And, you know, 100 people can't meet 99 others. So it's, it's, you have to be thoughtful around who's the best person to meet and how do you match people up? How do you make sure that you match people with people they haven't met before? You know, what are their haves or their wants? That entire thing used to be me sitting down and thinking like, oh, You know, Jay-Z would really appreciate meeting Annie, but I don't know if they've met before. Now I write software to do that. I write an agent that goes in and actually does matching. I write an agent to figure out, hey, what are all the jobs that my head of products are hiring? How do we make sure that we make those available, but then build a mailing list of folks who I think when they're interested in work can get matched up automatically? So like the next generation of recruiting. I think a lot about using AI for content. So when I sit down, I have an AI that takes questions from people and then it's trained on my content like yours and it gives answers. But then I read those questions, evaluate the answers, and I'm like, hey, this is a theme I'm hearing. And then I sit down and I write down, when do the LLMs and I disagree? I go through and so all of these things are, are Anything that I'm doing that I think I can, you know, replicate, I try to obsolete myself. You know, when I first started my first job, I asked the best engineer that I worked with, who still is one of the best engineers I've ever met, what's the definition of a great engineer? And, you know, I thought it would be like, oh, someone who's got this degree or is well-versed in this technology stack. He's like, well, The best engineer I know is my dad. And of course, this is before tech in that case. And he's like, and my dad's definition is still my favorite, which is an engineer is someone who obsoletes themselves from everything they do. That's the definition of a great engineer. And I've taken that to every job that I've worked at. And it's funny because you'll run into people that are like, I don't know, I don't want to obsolete myself. That's my job. And I was like, ah, I think if I obsolete, there'll be a better job for me. What AI has done is turn that, you know, has basically put an APOW on that. It's like, if you can, if you can obsolete by just asking the AIs to do this for you. So why I'm saying that is I'm, my stack is what can I do to obsolete anything and everything I do on a daily basis.

That is super cool. I love this. I love hearing these stories. Like what I find is the best tactic here is just solve your own problem. Think about something that's not great in your day-to-day or something you just wanna improve and just like, and it's like, it sounds so easy. All you do is go to, I don't know, Lovable or install Claude Code, download Codex and just tell it, I want to build a dashboard to control my Sonos. And then it just tells you, like walks you through everything you need to explore. And that's, that's a pretty advanced thing to try, but it's just like English. Like it sounds like I have no idea how to do this. Like you just tell it, here's what I want to do. Just like a person and it helps you figure it out.

Well, and I agree with you. And then I think the question is like, what skill do you have to have? Like for a while I was like, oh, that's a systems engineering skill because you need to be able to like train, you know, the AIs to go after things. But I'm watching my wife and how she works, and she's not an engineer by any means, and she's getting tons of value. You don't even need to be an engineer.

You just have to be opinionated on what you want to see and know what you want. Yeah, I know what good looks like.

And then the moment that you get it, it's when the light bulb turns on when it wasn't working before. And now you sit down and there's this moment where it's like, hey, I used to have to go and work to do this, but now my agent's doing this. And then what's the next agent I could do to make my life a little bit better? And that's where you catch the bug.

It's such a powerful thought that your job can be much more joyful as a product manager, as any function. But you know, we're focusing on PMs. Just like if you look at your pie chart today of how much hap— how happy you are during the day, you can actually be much happier in this future. And I think that's hard for people to like really think just realize, oh wow, okay, I can actually love this job so much more. I did not imagine that.

Yeah. And I think that it's because you're staring at change. And I think change is such an alarm bell. It's hard to hear the voice that says the thing that you are changing are the things you don't love because change is so hard for us that it's so scary. You know, and I respect that. So I think that if your listeners are able to sort of understand that, hey, there is a world which is better, but I have to go through the tunnel and the tunnel sucks and the tunnel may mean that I'm going to have to change jobs. I mean, my prediction is the vast majority of people that are listening to this will be in a different job in the next 5 years because they will either choose to move to something because they will— that company will struggle to stay modern, just like we're describing. People need to stay modern, companies need to stay modern, or their companies are going to be shedding and returning off staff. And so because change is apparent, I think it's just so deafening. People are very much gun-shy to be excited about something that's forced on them. And, you know, let's be honest, it's been forced on everyone. You know, it's not something that they chose. So that's why I have a lot of empathy. But when I talk to people, I try to dig through Forget what's happened and, you know, why, how do we make the best out of it? And the best, it's pretty good.

So say we've convinced a listener, okay, I need to make a change. I need to lean into this. I need to take this seriously. I can't just sit back and hope it all works out. Okay. And then they maybe found a moment of joy. They built something that's super cool and just like, hey, check this out. What other advice do you have for folks listening to help them be to serve? I don't know, let's not say survive, but just like thrive in this future that is emerging for product?

Yeah, I like thrive. I definitely think that, you know, you find that moment of joy, you have the engineering mindset, which is, hey, I want to obsolete myself on something that I do today. Again, reduce my— the less joyful parts of my job is a good starting point. I think that, you know, you have to find ability to increase pace. You know, this is not a job. This is the next 2 years requires a lot of fire in the belly, a lot of agency that I know everyone talks about. So, for example, if you were to leave a job and start a new job, you probably don't view the new job year 1 at the same pace that you, you know, viewed your year 5 in your last job. You need to kind of bring it. If you have a new relationship, you know, and if you've come off of a long-term relationship, my suspicion is your first year of that relationship, you put your best foot on. This is what I'm asking. You got to find that reserve. You've got to make time. You've got to maybe disappoint others in a way that you haven't in the past in order to create time for you to stay current, find that joy, obsolete yourself from the things that are not worth it. I think the other thing you have to do is you have to swallow your ego. You know, I don't want a single person saying, hey, I was an XYZ leader. I would only consider roles at that same level. I want people, this is an extension of our last conversation, is not only is it in vogue to be hands-on in an IC, it's kind of a necessity. I need everyone to sort of say, look, if everything's changing, it doesn't matter what we've done in the past. That brand doesn't matter as we discussed. You have to have an egoless perspective of how to stay current and you would be not only willing but actually look for ways to even take something smaller in order to make sure that you're kind of going through the tunnel correctly. And then ultimately part of the way we, we do, we swallow that ego is you stay long-term focused. You say, look, if the way we build product is changing so aggressively, My job is to spend the next couple of years being on the boat that's, you know, leaving the station and going to the new world. Once I get to the new world, the cream rises to the top. I'll take my skills, my leadership, and I'll go through it. But in the next few years, if everything's changing, I definitely want to be, you know, current. And that means you have to have a long-term focus. You know, my property is called the Skip. The community and everything, they all kind of come down to this word called the skip. And I chose that word because the best career advice is always not thinking about the next move, but the move after. What's the skip job? What's the skip opportunity? Well, in this world, it's not about what's the opportunity now and what's the journey. It's about making sure that your skip opportunity is saved and you are able to get that high salary. You're able to get one of those premier builder jobs. And that's the world that you have to have and the mindset you have to have.

Something you mentioned earlier was really interesting, that in the next 5 years you predict that most people's jobs will be very different. What are you imagining there? Like, will there still be this product manager role? Will PMs need to move closer to engineering? What's kind of like the Venn diagrams or spectrum you're seeing of where current PMs may go?

Yeah, I, I definitely think that there's a world where PMs go to every industry as the, what I would call the agents of change, because the PMs are the ones that can talk. They're the ones that have the broadest view of the organization, but they look at it through the technical lens. And my hope is that most of our PMs are the first to the tools. And hence they're the change agents within their company. So let's just play this out. In the next year, we start to see all these product organizations changing the way they build product. And all of a sudden, the way we build product is gentrified and really, really thoughtful and really far along. And then 12 months later, the marketing, the sales organization, the HVAC company that was bought by the private equity firm, The school down the road, you know, everything's like, boy, we are just not up. We're not current. We're going to get obsolete. Who do we bring in to be in charge of this change? Well, you know, this person works in the future. We need to get to future. So I'm like really bullish that product leaders are going to be like, you know, like those like dandelion, whatever you call it, seeds when you blow it and they just go everywhere. I have that vision. Meanwhile, I think a lot of people going into product might be coming from design, might be coming from data science, might be coming from engineering because the ones that have judgment, the ones that can talk, the ones that want to stay current, they might be like, well, I don't necessarily want to just stay in my lane. I want, I have a point of view as to how this should work. You know, as you said, from a designer point of view, designers may have a lot of those skills and opinions on what it should look like. Maybe their platform won't be the pixels or the visuals. They will be the product itself and they can adjacently move into product. So I think you're going to see this crazy influx and then this amazing, you know, kind of exodus. And then you'll also see folks that are like, oh, I don't know if I can get in. So I know that's a confusing kind of set of three changes, but that explains why so many people have anxiety is all three of these are happening instantaneously.

There's a line, they thought they buried us. They didn't know that we were seeds that I think about.

I love that. We're into a lot of the darker.

Speaking of that, there's this hilarious tweet that just came out the other day that I have here where this guy describes the only 4 jobs that will remain in the future. Uh, so the only 4 jobs that will exist in the future. One is product engineer, vibe coder, PM, slop cannon. Number 2 is security, SRE, infra person. Uh, number 3 is hot people, which is like, you know, like getting people to buy your stuff, customer service, kind of like people, the way they remember there are many ways to be. I know that here's how they put it. Present that easy UX to the world is, is that category. And then grownups, which is your point of just like adults. Yeah. So.

Yeah, I think there's this, I read that and I agree with that. I mean, I think the adults exist and I think anyone that's the top of their field that can talk and that's, that essentially is opinionated and can go broad, that's kind of the third point of hot people.

So that's actually, that reminds me. So Amol, the head of growth at Anthropic made this really interesting point that so much of his time now more and more is alignment as a product manager. And we were joking, what's the harder alignment problem, aligning people in a company or like AI? AGI and, and I, and it feels like that's like a remaining, and it's part of what you described, somebody that can get shit done, a change agent. And a big part of that is like what a PM often is doing a lot of their time is like creating alignment internally around what we will be doing, what we're prioritizing, that kind of thing.

Yeah. And I think that if you dissect what alignment looks like, a lot of alignment was getting people the right information. The ground-level truth, that problem is dramatically better. That part of the job, frankly, just absolutely sucked, whether it was the status report or, you know, I was on projects where there was like docs that were sent to me and then I would change the doc to then send it to my boss and then that boss would send it to, you know, and it was just like this movement of information. Where the ground truth was buried in some part of the organization. And then there were like all these people that were putting on their spin. That, I think, is changing. But to your point, now someone has to decide and someone has to have an opinion and what to fight for. And that conversation is now much clearer to have because, you know, the ground truth, there's less spin. You know, the CEO can literally ask their agent, well, what is the situation? What is— how is this performing? What does this customer really want? You know, how does this affect the system? You know, is this really something that we want to change the product to enable? So that conversation can happen, but now people can like fight it out, you know, with real credence, right? And if you're a product person that really does have an opinion and wants to make a point, you have a forum. So alignment will go away. It's just, it's not going to have as much theatrics. And I think a lot of companies that are larger do have theatrics that I think AIs are going to remove. And I don't know many PMs, there's some that lived for the theatrics, but frankly, most of them are like, this just seems like a fricking waste of time. I mean, it's so telling that 80%, I bet you, this is a statement, 80%, if you truly ask their, you know, your PM, do you really want that boss's boss job? Would you want their day? Not the pay, not the credibility, not the stature, but do you want their back-to-back meetings? I bet you most of them would say no. And what I'm suggesting to you is that answer is going to change in the next few years.

What's really also interesting is as much as this role is changing, engineering is changing even more. And in my— what I feel like is that the engineers that will continue to thrive are just are basically going to become more PM-y because the coding part is now going to be solved. And now it's just, what should we build? Is this great? Is this the direction we want to go? Is this going to— what does success look like? So if you're like, oh shit, my job is changing, just imagine being an engineer right now and how crazy that must feel.

Yeah. And I think the one advantage that engineers have is they think in systems and they think about obsolescence more effectively. So I think that You know, when you make a change, you have to decide, is this change going to be sustainable in the product that you're offering? I think an engineer has an edge there. I think the other edge they have is like, I bet you we can build this to be more automated, to be simpler.

I think the minority goes there. Yeah. Yeah.

So I think that every one of us, like the product person, probably has a little bit of an edge in judgment and communication. The engineer is going to have a little bit of edge in the system scaling. And how does this change affect folks? The designer is going to have a little bit of an edge with taste, and all of these things will still remain important. And, you know, obviously people that have all of these will do better than those that have one or two. But the industry is more than safe, as evidenced by your report, that there's more hiring. And I think it's going to grow. It's just different class of individual. This is what we're trying to communicate.

Uh, the design piece is really surprising to me, the fact that but like there's data show that the number of design roles is plateauing and just how teams are just not, uh, valuing design as much as you think. Like you would think that design becomes much more important as the number of products grows exponentially, that it's like a, a way to stand out, to build something really beautiful and, and ex, and have a really thought through experience. And it's interesting that That's not happening right now. Also, just, I've been thinking about like, like there's no world where I'm a great designer. I can't just like use AI and become a great designer. Unlike an engineer, like maybe a PM, I could become a much better PM with AI. AI is not like, it will, you know, do some cool stuff, but I'm never gonna feel like I am a great designer now. So it's really interesting that design isn't more successful right now with the rise of AI.

And it might be that we just don't know what to make of design. In this era. You know, that might be a piece of it. The other piece might be just like there's product builders and then, you know, product, you know, information movers and they're split up. I think that there are pixel generators and then there are tastemakers. And I worry that in design, maybe the industry itself conflates design with more production and not with taste. And so I think there's a lot of companies that you would talk to, and even when they were hiring head of design, they were thinking more around, we need more production. And great designers are much more tastemakers. And I think that is probably— that bias is entering into the hiring plans in this era that we have today.

What a wild time we are living through, Nikhil. Holy, holy moly.

Yeah. Isn't it funny that neither of us are operational? There are days when I'm like, man, am I so happy I have the time to work on this. And then other days that I think this is some of the most interesting, like being operational right now is quite a ride. And so there's good, good and bad. And, you know, COVID wasn't easy. I mean, there was a lot of challenges around, you know, working and seeing so much change. So there's always something. But this one, this one's, you know, everything's being questioned and, you know, including how you're how you define joy, which I think is just absolutely fascinating.

Chaos is a ladder, as, as the Littlefinger famously said. Um, Nikhil, is there anything that we haven't covered? Anything else that you think is important for people to hear? Any other advice? Anything you want to double down on before we wrap up and get to our very exciting lightning round?

I would just say that there's a lot of room to be optimistic right now. But you have to find it within yourself to recognize that there is a small period of change and exhaustion that's required to find that moment of joy. And I just urge everyone to find those reserves to get there, because once you do, it's infectious. But the longer you wait, the harder it is to cross that chasm. And so I really want people to feel optimistic and find that moment of joy. But I also recognize that there is a lot of activation energy that it takes to get there. And so my hope is that, you know, you, you've, and there's a lot of people going through it. And so, you know, there's some safety in numbers here, but definitely I urge everyone to try their hand at rethinking their craft.

And just to be clear, you're seeing many people in the community doing well, enjoying this, thriving. This is possible.

Yeah, it's smiling exhaustion. I see in my community everyone, and before it was just exhaustion. So I take smiling exhaustion over exhaustion, but the pace is relentless. I don't have any— there's nothing I can say to sugarcoat that point.

What a time to be alive. Well, Nikhil, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got 5 questions for you. Are you ready?

Go, go for it.

What are 2 or 3 books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

You know, Lenny, I'm not a reader, so I don't, you know, I don't, I, I, I, I hate to admit this, but I kind of vibe code instead of most consumption of code right now or content right now. You know, all of the reading I do is like trying to stay up to date. And that was a casualty, you know, so I don't listen to as many podcasts I want to. I don't read as much as I want to because I have so much information coming from the agents that I have deployed and all the stuff that's going on with, you know, on, on Reddit and X and all that. So I don't have a great set of book suggestions, not unlike, you know, all your other all your other guests that are great at this, you know, they read prolifically and, you know, I just don't. I mean, I'll tell you, I read, I don't know how much I loved it and I'll just leave it in here in case people are interested, but I read this book called James, which James is the story of Huckleberry Finn told from Jim's point of view. I thought that was absolutely fascinating because anytime you take a classic and then you look at it through the eyes of someone else, and what you realize is that story is quite powerful, but, you know, very haunting. And when you read Huckleberry Finn, you're a kid. So the distinction between seeing the innocence as not only the book was written from Twain's perspective, who quite forward-thinking, by the way. But you remember you were a kid at the time, and now as an adult, you see the book from another angle. I thought that was interesting. I don't know if I'd recommend it to your readers, but I thought— I always look for things that I'm, you know, unnatural stories that exist, you know, right in plain sight. So that was an example of that.

I think somebody else has actually recommended that book. So that's the second mention. Uh, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show? You've already shared some Stripe coding favorites to be in the background. Anything else?

Yeah. I mean, I think everyone's talking about Paradise. I, I mean, if you haven't watched the season 1 and season 2, it's all season 2 out. I didn't realize that season 2 just is almost wrapping up and I haven't watched season 2 yet, but you know, it's a little apocalyptic in nature, but it's absolute fascinating character drama. About how, you know, how people deal with, you know, very, very challenging times and what motivates individuals. The other one that I really like is Lioness, which is on Paramount+. Lioness is a story really about sort of a covert CIA group and how they deal with, you know, protecting security for America and the importance and what it means to commit. To a bigger cause. I thought that was a really well-written show. So both of those I recommend. I do watch a ton of television and, uh, and, and as I mentioned, I, I vibe codes to certain shows and these two I don't vibe code to because I have to pay attention.

That's the ultimate. That's the new bar of if something's great.

Exactly.

Okay. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love? Could be an app, it could be a gadget, could be some— something else.

My favorite product that I've discovered of late might be kind of obvious to a lot of folks, but I, you know, I'm not a car guy. So I'll just start by saying that though I've enjoyed kind of riding like the newer electric cars, I just— I'm not— there's a large, large number of people that love cars. They love driving cars and, you know, talking about cars and repairing cars. That's like the opposite of me. I just want my car to be super reliable. And I've had a Tesla for a really long time, a Model S for just a long time. I mean, I've had it since pretty much they came out with them. And they, my daughter recently passed her driving exam and because she passed her driving exam, one day my wife said, hey, you know, we got to get her a car. And I was like, we do? I never actually connected the dots that she's going to need to drive a car. And I was like, well, aren't you going to go? And eventually I'm like, okay, maybe we should buy her a car. She's not going to drive that much. Maybe I should use this as an opportunity to upgrade my car. And so I drove the latest Teslas that are out there and the ones with the self-driving. And the self-driving works quite well, just to be clear. I mean, I have it now for the last month and about 95% of the time I self-drive. But the most interesting thing is I had no idea that I actually have mild anxiety when I drive that goes away when I self-drive. And I had no idea. And I, my, my wife noticed it when we were driving up to the mountains one day and it was crazy snowing and I'm like, we're going to do it. And she's like, you are so anxious when you drive. And I'm like, I am? Because Lenny, I've been driving since I was 14 years old because I grew up in Kansas. And so I passed the test when I was 14. So I've been driving literally for nearly 40 years. And I had no idea as I've gotten older that this pressing a button and going places in a cycle is just so awesome. So anyway, the reason why that experience is interesting, yeah, there's the tech and all that. It's just like, I look for ways to reduce my anxiety. Anything that causes anxiety, I try to eliminate at this point in my life, and this is one of them. So that's a cool product for me.

I love that as a rule. I've also become all in on self-driving. I've had a Tesla for a long time. From the beginnings of their explorations into self-driving. And it was always just like, I don't know, this is scary. And now it's the opposite. Like my wife prefers I self-drive even though I drive well. She's just like, feels safer when the self-driving is on. There's, and there's, and there's this like, uh, in the actual settings, they give you a stat of what percentage you're driving is self-driving. And they noted it since, uh, 14.2, I think was the release, something like that. So that was like the release that everyone started being like, wow, it's actually very good now. And I don't think a lot of people realize that it's actually incredibly good. Like, I haven't had a single concerning moment.

This is one of those examples in product where so many people try the previous versions that when you then tell your friend— a lot of people have Teslas, obviously in California, but across the world— when you tell your friends, a lot of people are like, oh yeah, I tried it, I turned it off. So I think Tesla's got this unusual challenge of getting people to turn it back on. And obviously the newer hardware is better than the older one and the new software. But once you go through one experience, it can be hard to convince someone to try it again. And that's an adage in product and certainly applies here.

It's the downside of releasing early and often. Sometimes people just have this memory of what it might be. I feel like, I feel like this, like Uber, where you most have to just start hearing about it from your friends telling you, hey, I'm doing this thing. You're like, wait, really? I guess I should try it.

Yeah, I figured. Yeah, they ought to just like— so here's a Tesla suggestion for anyone who's listening is Lenny and I should be able to gift 30 days free to our friends of self-driving, people that have turned it off because the referral of that plus the endorsement allows people to experience it for free and then they can get their monthly subscription.

Great idea.

That, that viral plus enablement, I think is a, is a growth tactic that, you know, they can have for free from us.

Such a good idea. By the way, I love Mad Max mode. I love that just the personality of the stuff. Just, are you a hurry mode guy or are you a standard mode guy?

I flip between them, but I do feel like I'm hoping that the new release of the software keeps us in lane.

Like, I don't love it changing lanes, but it's like where it's trying to hurry a little bit.

I'm like, I wish I could just get it to go at a normal speed, but also don't change lanes because I just don't like it.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in work or in life?

My high school quote in my yearbook still is my motto, which is genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration by Albert Einstein. It's something that even at an early age, and you know, it's not about genius being capital G, you know, it wasn't a meteor comet, It was more like hard work is really what matters in life. What's interesting is if you read that quote, genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, through the lens of AI, right? It's absolutely fascinating because it turns out the AI will do the perspiration.

Unlimited inspiration.

So I think what we're leaning towards is we all need We're moving to a world where we're all going to be inspired, and it's the inspired individuals in all of us that will, that will, you know, essentially continue to proliferate. And don't worry about the perspiration, but recognize that it is the perspiration that, that is, that is a necessity to make things go. So anyway, I think it's an interesting quote, especially in today's era.

Final question. People may have noticed that we've started collaborating on your podcast and your newsletter. It's this, it's such an underappreciated, under, I don't know, seen, uh, thing that you do. This podcast, this newsletter, it fills such a gap in, in the content out there around product building of just like very tactical, important, non-sugarcoated career advice for people in product. Um, and it's what I love about it is it's not AI most of the time in spite of this conversation we just had. It's like. Very much like here's stuff you need to know that is not flashy and shiny. AI, AI, AI all the time. So I want to give you a chance just to tell people about this, the podcast, the newsletter, just what, what the, what the idea is, where they, where they can find it.

I started this property called Skip because I really felt that there was a dearth of content from operators sharing best practices with, with emerging operators. And the idea was, look, I had been a founder before. I'd been an executive before, and I wanted to be in a position where I can say, hey, this is exactly what I experienced and this might apply to you. And I noticed that most of the podcasts and the content out there were from folks that hadn't spent as much time in operating, more time in content. And, and I was kind of the opposite. Then I started building this community that I spoke about last time, which was, you know, about 20, 30 at the time. Now it's over 125 head of products who are all kind of these builders, top of their game, and kind of reinventing what product management looks like. And our goal is to collectively share our wisdom as operators to help people advance in career. And that probably, that calling is probably more important now than ever as everything's changing. And so one of the things that we're launching next month, by the time that, you know, we end up launching this episode is something called Skip.help, where we have agents that have been trained on about 50 of our community leaders. And so you can go and ask a question. It might be preparing for an interview. It might be a question around navigating your current environment. It might even be, you know, how do I build a chief of staff app? And 50 of us, not just me, will respond. And this is powered by our friends over at SuperMe, which is a great startup that that actually by having these agents, you get the sort of wisdom of the crowds. And so those are the things that I love. And obviously the community itself is a very curated group. And it's, you know, there's an infinite waitlist. A lot of people want to be in it. I'm only growing it slowly because I want to maintain trust. But I do have this mailing list called Skip.Coach where we share our wisdom to a broader audience. So I know I've kind of gotten every single domain name that starts with Skip. Skip Community, Skip Shows, my podcast, Skip Coach, Skip Health. But anyway, go to any of them and you can triangulate to all of them. And I always appreciate, Lenny, your support and your help in building this property with me. So it's been great. You know, when I came on, I don't think I had done my podcast yet. And now I'm about ready to hit my 50th episode and you're a big inspiration and you're past 300, obviously. And so, you know, it's fun to see how things change and somehow how things happen. So It's been great.

So fun. Uh, I was going to ask you to share the domains, which you did. So it's skip.coach, skip.community, skip.show, and then there's skip—

skip.help is their new one.

skip.help, which is launching around the time this goes out. And then you also have your Substack. I don't know if one of those takes you there, but it's theskip.substack.com.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The Skip is the name of the podcast and newsletter, and Skip Show takes us to both.

Mikhail, thank you so much for being here. This was exactly what I was hoping. I feel like people are going to leave this being like, okay, I get it now. I understand what I need to be doing.

I appreciate that. And, you know, thanks for all you do for the community and for all the guests that, that, you know, you still have now, probably two dozen of the folks on Skip that have been on the show or that will be on the show. So thanks for supporting all of our efforts. We're trying to help as many product builders as possible, and that's a great journey to be on together.

It is. Nikhil, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks, Lenny. Thanks, everyone.

¡Hola a todos! Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at LennysPodcast.com. See you in the next episode.