Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - How AI is reshaping the product role | Oji and Ezinne Udezue

Starting point is 00:00:00 It really irked me when in 2024, most people were saying AI is here and now the PM job is gone. There were others who were saying AI is here, so now we can do the things we don't like to do with AI. What do you find is most common across the companies that are succeeding? Companies that recognize that AI is not this magic thing that you're going to slather on to your product. The problems are still the problem. Something else that I think is also really important is getting super hands-on with the tech. I've written more code in the last one year than I have in the last one year. the last 10 years because code is now essentially architecture and English.

Starting point is 00:00:34 I'll pick a project that touches a lot of the things that I need to learn. One of the fashion points I have is to automate my house. The idea is that I give the house eyes and ears. The coolest thing is I've specked out a super sensor. It will see people, hear them. It will sense humidity and temperature and I'm building the hardware myself. Today my guests are Aji and Azeene Udeswe. are married, both longtime product leaders with over 50 years of combined product experience.

Starting point is 00:01:06 They're also the authors of a new book that I love called Building Rocket Chips, product management for high growth companies, which is a synthesis of their biggest product lessons over the course of their entire career. Aji was Chief Product Officer at Callanley and Type Forum and led product teams at Twitter, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Asinae was CPO at WP Engine and VPR product at ProCorp. We chat about what is changing in the role of product management. Also, what is staying the same?

Starting point is 00:01:31 We also get into the shift of PM to end ratios that AI is introducing, the five skills becoming most important in being a successful PM over the coming years, and the single biggest lesson that each of them have learned over the course of their careers. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 15 incredible products, including lovable, replet, bolt, N8N, linear superhuman Descript whisperflow gamma perplexity warp granola magic patterns raycast chapyrrr and mobbin head over to lenny's newsletter.com and click product pass with that i bring you aji and ezzine o'desway this episode is brought to you by mercury i've been banking with

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Starting point is 00:03:31 Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry-leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO-27-001 or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you can win bigger deals sooner. The result, according to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash Lenni. Aji and Ezzene, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Thank you for having us, Lenny. It's absolutely my pleasure. You guys are. a rare guest duo. You two are married. You're both longtime product leaders. You've been in product combined for over 50 years. The cool thing about the fact that you guys have been in product for so long is that you've seen a lot of change in the role of the PM and the role of building products. You've also seen what doesn't change. And so let me actually start here and I'll throw this to Ezene. What are you seeing changing most in the role and day-to-date job of a product manager? And what are you seeing staying the same? At a high level, the core value that a PM has to deliver, it hasn't changed.

Starting point is 00:05:05 It really is derisking the product delivery process while also really trying to maximize the value the business gets from these investments. But tactically, I think that the good thing is that we're finding out that PMs are freed up more and as a result, they can actually invest more in developing true insights about their customer. So you're finding out your engineering leaders, engineering team is they're asking you to really confirm your insight and your instinct about the customer. The second thing I would say is that there's a need to orchestrate a little differently. So in the past it was around people Okay, strating people, getting on into the room, etc.

Starting point is 00:06:01 But now there are many moving pieces. There's the software. There are also the feedback loops, the LLMs that are the multiple touch points that you have in technology. Ensuring that those are also being built in a way that allows for true learning within your software. So that idea of working static software isn't true anymore. It's almost like living, breathing software. and ensuring that the things that allow it to breathe actually occur. The other piece, two other pieces, data literacy,

Starting point is 00:06:33 an understanding of what it is that your product is learning from, where is the data going and how is it being used, how is it being organized so that it could be leveraged for future insight about your product use and customer use. And then the last I would say is just creating the right guardrails within your product to ensure that it actually continues to do what it needs to do. You know, we spoke earlier and I have a whole thing about ethics of AI, et cetera. And I think that we have a responsibility as product people. And I'm seeing PMs ask the questions that we didn't get to see them ask when we're building social media.

Starting point is 00:07:19 So those are the kind of things I would say. I definitely want to come back to that topic. There's something you just talked about that connects so deeply with something a recent guest talked about. Asha Sharma, she's chief vice president at Microsoft, again, AI, and she had this concept that products are evolving

Starting point is 00:07:35 from product as artifact, where it's this like done thing you ship to a product as organism that continues to evolve based on data that it's feeding in this metabolism of data. In our book, you'll see we talk about systems, and I have this innate passion around the idea of what a system is, and it has to do with that living, breathing, and interaction with other things. So yes, yes, yes, and yes. Let me throw over to Aji,

Starting point is 00:08:04 this first point you made, I love this idea that PMs, there's more time spent almost kind of the top of the funnel, the top of the product development lifecycle, confirming insights from customer data, deciding what to build. There's talk recently of just PMs are almost becoming the bottleneck for teams because engineers are moving so much faster and PMs are the same, just like sitting, maybe docs are easier to write. What do you see there? What do you think about just the, I don't know, this ratio shift potentially where PMs almost become a bottleneck with AI accelerating other functions? For the last 20 years, we've had like very fixed ratios in terms of how it gets done. PM takes this amount of time, developers take the amount of time, go-to-market

Starting point is 00:08:46 takes a lot of time. And I think that's a very fixed ratios in a lot of time. And I think that contract is basically exploding because the build process, you know, sort of the close solutionary process of the build process is accelerating so fast. And so a company we worked with told us that, you know, there's sort of like a build contract build company. They say they will get off the phone from a pitch and in four hours they would have a prototype. And so the question is like, what is a PM doing? The person listening to that is half PM, half developer. You not to be able to produce that. And so what we're seeing is that the way, you know, PM do three things.

Starting point is 00:09:26 We think about what the customers want that is profitable. So working on sharp problems and defining sharp problems and what's make customers mind that makes it sharp. We support the solutioning and the build of it. And then we don't do this enough, but we need to support the go-to-market of it. And so what's happening is that this middle thing is becoming more capable and much faster. And so the way we support it, it has to change. PRD writing is insufficient at the moment.

Starting point is 00:09:52 You know, sort of like the static way we ask questions about what's in the customer's minds is like, that stuff needs to be like faster. The cycle time is so fast now. And so PMs need to adapt. And that needs new tool sets, new skill sets, and so on and so forth. I think that's where the most pressure is. But at the same time, like Izina said, PMs can take some of the, if they adapt to this really well, they can spend a lot more time here.

Starting point is 00:10:19 And that's where there's a lot of opportunity. And the thing that we want PMs to do is not be the crouch, not worry about people saying, oh, you're the bottleneck. No, don't be the bottleneck first of all. But also since you see everything, at value in other places where traditionally you ever spend time. I want to pull on this sharp problem thread. This is my favorite Aji meme.

Starting point is 00:10:40 We talked about this a bit in your, when you visited the podcast last. I think it's such a useful concept. So I just want to make sure people learn this while we're talking about. Talk about what a sharp problem is and why that's important. One of the things I learned from failing a lot at building companies is that sometimes, you know, the way that Y C.O. The people pitch it is that, you know, you build something and if it doesn't work, you pivot, da-da-da, you know, stuff like that. But it turns out that in the world of high technology and the world of figuring out what customers need, there are many shortcuts that

Starting point is 00:11:13 mean that pivoting isn't just like a habit, something you walk around drunkenly doing. A lot of the most successful people, you know, Doge Gates, Facebook, and so they didn't even pivot. They had an idea, but it turned out that the idea was a sharp problem. So like the way to avoid drunken startup building is pick things that are old, their core needs. And the way you profit is when you reimagine old needs in new technological ways. And that's important. Now, let's frame it in the sharp problem.

Starting point is 00:11:52 What do people feel they need help with? What is still difficult to the point that if you improve it three to five times, maybe 10x, or you take cost out of it, like 10x to cost, right? One 10. They'll be like, this is so compelling. should take my money now. And that's what Lus Founders should really, really focus on if they can. There's extended

Starting point is 00:12:17 stuff we talked about over the years like the Unicorn framework, which is like if you're building for B2B specifically, how do you draw a quadrant around the problem? So you know if it's highly frequent, because frequency also means a lot of pain and figure it out, but that's something people that are read

Starting point is 00:12:33 in the substrate. Yeah, and we talked about that in our last chat, so I'll point people to that. Okay, so building on this idea of being a drunken walk of figuring with to build. You have this concept of the shipyard, and this is kind of a way to think about how to think about what product development might look like going forward and just a model for how to work in this chaotic world that we're in. Talk about what that looks like and the advice here. I'm going to give some credit. When I was Atlassian, the first time I encountered the

Starting point is 00:13:01 idea was with Jack Redfern. He's now like a VC. And he talked about it. But I've taken the idea because I loved it to maybe a whole different level, maybe it says of clarity. A shipyard is to evoke controlled chaos. If you go to a shipyard at peak, you know, Long Beach or whatever it is, there's so much going on. And like big heavy machinery moving around, trucks and containers from China, from Malaysia jumping around. But this chaos underline it is careful communication, high skill, right?

Starting point is 00:13:38 So what looks like, you know, brown end motion is actually orchestrated progress. And, you know, these are, these shipyards are the center of GDP for a lot of nations, because this is where trade happens. So this is what is supposed to evoke is controlled chaos. And so what the shipyard team looks like is a six-person team. It is PM, it is engineering, it is design, it is user. research is data ML AI expertise AI PMS or whatever you know call it it is product marketing in a pod problem solving you know in this certainly in AI age the idea of stand-ups isn't really even

Starting point is 00:14:23 make as much sense right these people should be you know communicated at collaborating our mean basically to solve the problem because it's really they're working in the new problem so i think that's what the core ship your team means and then there are these tendrils to You know, we call salespeople, customers to customers the nervous, the skin. Like, think about the shipyard team as the brain, but this is the skin. This is how you feel customers. And so here's a concrete example. Before I shipped anything in Caldly, I did the desire review with a support manager, right?

Starting point is 00:14:59 A support manager had to be in the role because the design people and engineering people, as much as we cared, we will shift problems all the time, you know, feature debt. What a support manager looks at it and is like, that's not going to work. I've had a thousand conversations, and it was so useful. And so having the shift your team

Starting point is 00:15:18 have the tendrils of connection to the customer teams was so important. So what I'm hearing is essentially embrace chaos. Things are going to get only weirder. There's something I forget who, maybe the CPU at OpenAI said, just like, it's only going to get weirder. This is the least, this is the most normal the world will be.

Starting point is 00:15:34 going to be. And that's important because if the world is weird and you want to make sense of it, you need people who are highly motivated, have the right skill sets to continuously create it as it moves, as it gets weird. You said, I remember Lenny asked how many, you know, what is, what is Shepiard comprised of? He said, six people, person, team. I know that's going to come up and people are going to go, sorry, really, why? It's six, six capability team. Okay. It is not a person thing. It is engineering, however many you need.

Starting point is 00:16:11 Again, it's all about admission. It's PM, it's design. It's the capabilities I'm optimizing for, right? It's the data in ML. It's product marketing and it's a user research. PMs can't do it. You need the capabilities. And whether it's a fractional person within Matrix into that EPD team

Starting point is 00:16:29 or 10 people because of developers, that's what you need. Yeah. Yeah. So what I'm hearing there is, roles will become blurrier, that PMs need to do more design, engineers need to do more PMing, people need more data skills.

Starting point is 00:16:42 So to me, those are the two takeaways. It's just learn to be more comfortable with chaotic world. Just AI cons every week, there's like, oh, this is changing everything. Rethink the roadmap. And then also the roles will be less divided.

Starting point is 00:16:56 People will need to learn to do many roles and chip in. Awesome. So building on that, as you know, when you hire PMs these days, when you're looking for product leaders, what do you, is there something you're looking for more and more because you believe this will be more important to be successful in a world where AI is just changing everything? I think Oji started, he laid a foundation when he said it's day one. And when you're working and thinking about building product in this type of era of space, it's important. important that you remember that. So I'm going to talk about what it is that I typically will look for from an attitude's values and behaviors point of view as well as a skills point of view. I'm currently

Starting point is 00:17:42 working with a firm in LA and I'm building curriculum for their PMs as well as helping them recruit. And the things that we hone in on our curiosity. And I know it's been said over and over again, but it matters more now. It is, is our people, is this person humble and curious enough to admit they don't know and are willing to start as a learner? Do they truly have a growth mindset where they are okay being taught by someone else, no matter how senior they have become? That is very important. That humility and curiosity mixed together. The second part is, what?

Starting point is 00:18:28 what I'd call agency, being able to see opportunity and not ask others for permission to go execute on that opportunity, but actually take the opportunity themselves, have a strong, there's another word most people use for this. It's not coming to me, but just take the bull, take the bull by the horns. But no, there's another characteristic of value, behavior. But high agency, being able to just move forward and feel, act like an owner, right? Ownership, that's the word. High ownership. But I think ownership is seeing that you can run.

Starting point is 00:19:09 But I think agency assumes that you control, you're more of a thermostat than a thermometer. And that means that, hey, the thermometer is always measuring the temperature of the room, while a thermostat will change the temperature of the room. So I'm looking for that in people. And I want people who can move from a position of strength. It really irked me when in 2024, most people were saying AI is here and now the PM job is gone. And there were others who were saying AI is here.

Starting point is 00:19:39 So now we can do the things we don't like to do with AI and then go to focus on the things that we need to do. So people who spoke that way are the types of people I want on my team. From a skills perspective, obviously an understanding of data, right? just high level of how is it organized, how is it leveraged in this new world of AI. There's this skill of being able to write e-vowels. I know everybody can write prompts, prompt engineering. You can try and focus the LLM so that it can offer better insights and offer better results. But even as your LM actually produces results, you need to verify that it actually is smart

Starting point is 00:20:21 and it hasn't elucinated or gone off. by creating true e-vals, right? Those are some hardcore skills. Being able to constrain hallucination, knowing what ways you do that, being able to use multiple models and figure out what is good about this model versus that. One of the things I love to talk about is,

Starting point is 00:20:43 what does intelligence mean? Intelligence often people say is connecting dots. And the beauty of what it is that we have an opportunity to do is that with AI, you can find, you can train it so that it's very specific to a very particular task, right? It can become really smart in one area. And the idea now is how do you combine the smarts of what maybe Claude does, right, with something that GPT does better and make something even greater than each of them, right? So that's one of the things I'm looking for in a PM. And then being able to tweak for best for performance, whether it's choosing, whether it's just fine-tuning,

Starting point is 00:21:26 doing the weight adjustments. Ujie is very passionate about this one. We talk about it quite a bit. But that's the attitude's point of view where, you know, just strong ownership, strong agency curiosity, being humble. And then this idea of understanding beyond prompts, you know, really knowing that AI is just toolbox, right? And it can make major mistakes.

Starting point is 00:21:49 And how do you constrain it such that, Constrain it, optimize it, tweak it so that it can actually work on your behalf and not, like, you need to make it work for you versus being lost in all the things that it's able to do. I love this answer and it resonates so well with so many other people's advice, which is curiosity, skills that matter most. And this actually curiosity comes up a lot when I ask people, what skills are you focusing on teaching your kids? the number one skill people mention is curiosity.

Starting point is 00:22:22 I love that you included humbleness. I want to come back to that. So essentially, curiosity, humbleness, agency, such a meme these days and what PMs need to build and be strong at high agency. So, so great. And then e-vals, I like that a lot. That's also super common. I have a really cool guest post coming out really soon that'll teach you more than you ever

Starting point is 00:22:42 thought you needed to know about how to become really good at e-vals. but I want to double down on something you just said, which I love so much, which is this idea of instead of waiting to see what jobs AI takes, it's almost like the way you phrased it essentially is what jobs can you take as a PM? What can you do? Can you do more engineering? Can you give more design? Such an empowering way to think about it. Let me talk about something that's really personal. I'm part of the women in product organization. And I was asked to guest, right, end of last year, because there was a lot of fear in the community. And there was this thing called the rise of the C-TPO. It's this thing. It's been in the background there where I think many venture VCs, many PEs were asking, do I need a CPO as well as a CTO? Right? And I was always amazed at how many people were leaned back in this. this thing versus actually showing and proving the value of what a CPO could be. So in many places,

Starting point is 00:23:51 it is right that maybe you do only want one person, particularly when it's very well-known spaces, right? It's clear. They're not doing anything revolutionary. But it's like saying an engineer is the same as a product person. When you think about it, there is a conflict between the CPU and the CTO that actually drives innovation, in my opinion, because one person is trying to optimize the resourcing the fixed, right, while another person is actually trying to field opportunities and figure out how to wait and decide what is best to do. At the higher level, those are their jobs. And that tension is really good because you need them to sharpen each other as you try to maximize the value of the organization. I say all this to say that there are folks who are not

Starting point is 00:24:37 stopping to figure out how do we make the pie bigger, but they're looking at instead how do we divide this pie as it gets smaller versus asking the question of really what is the opportunity to increase this for all of us? And that is a skill set I also look

Starting point is 00:24:54 out for. Awesome. I'm going to go to Yaji in a second, but I want to come back on this humble idea. I haven't heard this before. Why is it, why do you find it really important for people to be humble? I haven't heard that piece of advice yet. Oh my gosh. Particularly now, it is really important to be.

Starting point is 00:25:11 Because I would say, okay, I went to school. I actually did neural networks in school when I was doing a project. And, you know, you get to this part of your career where you go, I kind of know a lot of what product is. And I do see folks who are not willing to go sign up for that new junior AI PM course because they're a CPO or their head of product or they're X, Y, or Z. or they're a principal PM now. And I think that that's a mistake.

Starting point is 00:25:40 I think that it's important to realize that you don't know everything. You can't know everything. And even as a leader, CPO, head of product, et cetera, I come from this school where I believe that in order to lead an organization, sometimes you actually do need to know how to do the work. And I think I lead better that way. So being able to sign up and say, you know what, let me sit in and figure out how we're going to build. to this thing. And number one, learn for yourself, but also figure out what questions other

Starting point is 00:26:14 PMs are asking in that course. Right. So it's about taking courses from people you may have considered junior figuring out and sitting and reading books that you thought, you know, just going back to the day one of how do you build product in an AI world. So that's where humility comes to play in this period where we are. You just don't know everything, can't know everything, and things will change faster than you're able to stay ahead of. So lean on your team as well. I just had this guy Chip Connolly on the podcast. He's in his 60s.

Starting point is 00:26:49 He joined Airbnb when he was 52 as an intern. And he said exactly the same thing to be successful. And it's interesting as a metaphor. As an older person, you need to be really good at being open to learning from people younger than you. And that's a really interesting, I think, lens and heuristic almost for just. people that aren't as AI savvy yet, just leaning into that idea of just like, okay, I can actually learn a lot from people around me,

Starting point is 00:27:13 even if they're much younger than me. Okay, so, Aji, something else that I think that you're really good at and you've been spending time on that I think is also really important, is getting super hands-on with the tech, not just like reading and not just listening to podcasts like this, not just reading newsletters, but like actually building stuff. Talk about just like why that's important what you've been doing to learn and to stay ahead and not just be like a pontificate or guy in the clouds.

Starting point is 00:27:40 I just love everything we've said in the last few minutes. I think the shorthand I have for humility is humility is teachability. And when do you need teachability? You need teachability when, you know, sort of everything has changed where there is no blueprint. And whatever you think is a blueprint of AI in the last. few years, you know, whether, oh, wow, lovable is so successful, the replet is so successful. It's actually quite possible that any one of those companies won't be around in two, three years, right, because we're still writing the playbook for what success looks like.

Starting point is 00:28:18 So humility is teachability, and teachability is survivability, if you were thinking about careers. And if you also, if you were thinking about building something that's important, it's also important like that. In terms of how we, how to keep your hand sharp, what I would say is a couple of things. One is I have written, Izzy and I both have a master's engineering, but we very quickly figured out that the thing that we were gifted at was helping the event the future, where customers thinking, you know, how do we work with developers to do that? And so we've been PMs forever. And being a PM means that even though we could, we don't. write code. We work with developers. We work with other people in market. But I've written more

Starting point is 00:29:02 code in the last one year than I have in the last 10 years, because code is now essentially architecture and English, or whatever language that you have. As well as that mean, I've taken the opportunity to write more code. I've taken the opportunity to convert PRD writing into prototype writing. I've taken the opportunity to write more API interfaces and actually call those API interfaces with Postman myself, I've taken the opportunity to subscribe to all the AI tools, right, and take that as a cost of learning so that I can understand what each model is useful for. I've taken the opportunity to understand MCPs, right, and connect to different things to it. Like right now, one of my head projects, one of the things I do in order to learn

Starting point is 00:29:48 is I pick a project that's almost like right then an evile, what's an evile for my life to learn, is I'll take a pick of a project that touches a lot of the things that I need to learn that I'm interested and passionate about. And as I get into it because of my passion, I start to learn more and more. And so one of the passion points I have is to automate my house. So I've been doing this for years and years, but now I'm trying to build a very smart house run on a processor that has AI chip and inference in it while the house looks dumb. because I don't want anyone to know about it.

Starting point is 00:30:25 And so what am I doing? Getting models. I am learning about what quantization of those models means. I am learning how to fine-tune some of them. I'm feeding them. I've built an MCP server in my house that talks to the home entities, and I can collaborate with Claude on how to build and make it super dynamic. But beyond that, one of the things we're spending time on is the Venture Studio,

Starting point is 00:30:52 raising capital for Avengers to do because that's what I want to spend the next decade on building Seminole AI companies beyond the book. I'm collaborating with some of the smartest people in AI right now who can teach me how to do this, how to write agents, what agents really mean. And so everything, as in it said, writing evals, being humble, going back after 25 years of being a PM to being teachable

Starting point is 00:31:19 is how I stay sharp. I want to go back to this house. What is your house doing? How smart is this house? The idea is that I give the house eyes and ears and it senses. The coolest thing is I've specced out what I call like a super sensor. It will see people. It will feel their heat.

Starting point is 00:31:45 It will hear them. It will sense humidity and temperature. And it will just be scattered around the house. And I'm building the hardware myself. And basically, as you walk into the house, it starts to adapt itself to you, right? It manages energy in the house. It knows you're in a room. If you leave, my kids are not in their in their rooms right now.

Starting point is 00:32:06 Well, the HVAC around them just stopped and said, oh, they're not here. When they come back, before they come back, before they come back, it starts to pre-cool their space. And then when they come back, it says, oh, they're here. And it starts to do cool things. So there's a lot of stuff like that ability. And the question is you don't want that to be completely inflexible. You want it to be super dynamic and superhuman. So that's part of the AI.

Starting point is 00:32:30 I am the recipient of all of this. I'm like, I woke up at 1 a.m. and I want toast. Why is the toast not working? Wait, hold on. He shut off the power. It's not good for you. That's why. No, but look at, look, is in there walks into lots of rooms in a house.

Starting point is 00:32:49 and the light just turns on. And when she leaves, she just walks out. And then no, she's not there and it turns it off. She's sticking it for granted. It's actually doing all this. Wow. It is. But there's also like a horror movie version of this.

Starting point is 00:33:03 Yes, there is. Well, what I will say is that my family should not kiss me off because, you know, I could do crazy things to them. I'm sorry. Oh, man. Okay. And this is built on like, Like an LLM that you trained?

Starting point is 00:33:21 Is that what the powers is? So multiple levels. There's this open source software called Home Assistant that I use. And you can, it's very extensible. So I can put in, like, fine-tune LLMs. I can use the big LLMs. There are things like smaller, like Spokun Whisper models you can use to,

Starting point is 00:33:42 like I can just say, hey, Jarvis, like Iron Man. And it also, the house will start talking to me and telling me things about what's going on. So things like that. Getting us back on track. You guys are geeking out right now. I'm excited and scared to visit this house. That's my dad. Get this out of me.

Starting point is 00:34:05 What I love about this is something that I've seen a bunch is having a very specific problem to solve for yourself is a really good way to build and get into these tools because you're motivated to solve a problem and it's like a specific thing. that you're doing versus just generally, I'm going to go sit around and play with lovable. No, I think I want to double click on that, Lenny. I was telling you the other time that we spoke that I get a lot of questions from,

Starting point is 00:34:31 I would say people who aren't very familiar with AI and they don't know where to start. And that is exactly what I say. So, hey, I know you love fashion, for example, right? Or you like reading, right? And you have the, you actually have the database of the entire Austin Library or whatever it is online, and you can pull it if you really want to,

Starting point is 00:34:52 and it can recommend based on your feeling. So you can create a project around what it is that you're passionate about. One particular woman, older lady, wanted to figure this out. I figure out a passion project, and I knew she liked this idea called Outfit of the Day. So with LLMs, she started a project where she actually took the time to take all her tops, all her bottoms,

Starting point is 00:35:17 all her dresses, all her shoes, and now she's working on based on the temperature, having recommendations of her outfit for the day. So that's one way she was able to find something that she loved and could take a leverage AI to build. And that could help her determine, okay, what should I wait or what are the options I should consider for today? That's an amazing example. Can I just make like one, you know, I'm always like high concept prediction guy.

Starting point is 00:35:44 So I'm going to make one prediction. I think that, you know, in the next few years, a lot of high agency people, or just PMs, was essentially to be writing the software that automates their lives, right? And so the one-man SaaS is going to go away because the ability to, there'll be a hundred billion developers because we will, people who really care will automate their lives. They'll build applications that just works with them. and the advice for PMs is we should be the vanguard with that because if we can start doing that for ourselves,

Starting point is 00:36:19 we'll be able to do that for software that hits a million people because that's the way to get started. And we also want to offer hope. It's still day one, meaning that no matter how far, if you hear me, I hear about fine-cheating and home assistants and all this crazy hardware we're trying to build and you're scared. Like, I'm behind.

Starting point is 00:36:38 You're not behind. You're not behind. People who seem like they're succeeding. We were here when, you know, the internet dropped and everyone, you know, Microsoft thought it was behind. And, you know, with social, people, some people thought they were behind. The people who seem like the off-the-gate fastest, whether it's a company or person, not the people who win. And so it's the wisest and the most dedicated to win. And so people should just start.

Starting point is 00:37:03 You know, evil people, we have a proverb that says, whatever you wake up is your morning. And so just wake up and go. I love so much of the advice you two are sharing. There's a post I'm going to link to in the show notes that shares a bunch of examples of what people are vibe coding, building with AI. That seems to be the biggest challenge for a lot of people is just like, what should I actually do? And something that I realized as I was putting that together is people think about like, oh, can you build real products and businesses on bold, lovable replet? But interestingly, most people just want to build a thing that solves a specific problem for themselves. And sometimes that turns into a thing.

Starting point is 00:37:38 but there's almost a bigger opportunity just to build those personal software. Similar to the example you shared as in A, there's a site. Someone built this, like, how many layers should I wear today?com or whatever. I don't think that's the actual domain and it's just like three. And that's sometimes all you need to know.

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Starting point is 00:39:07 months of the team plan.coda.io slash Lenny. So let me take this opportunity to zoom out a little bit. We've been talking a lot about personal skills, what you think people need to get better at, what it takes to be successful. I'm going to talk about at the company level. You two work with a bunch of different companies. You both worked at a bunch of different companies. When you look at the companies that seem to be doing well in this new AI world, adopting the best practices, seeing productivity gains versus the companies that are just struggling and not getting anywhere and just having a hard time, what do you find is most common across the one, the companies that are succeeding, shifting their culture and the way they work in this world of AI? And I'll throw this to as in a first.

Starting point is 00:39:49 I think the main thing I will say is recognizing, companies that recognize that AI is a core set of multiple capabilities that they've been. gifted. I think that you need to understand that. It is not this magic thing that you're going to slather on to your product and it will do perfectly. The problems are still the problems. The customer is still the problem is still the customer and their pain or sharp problems still exist as they have. The idea now is how do you take AI and not have it be something we call it, you put at the edge alone, but you actually retransform the way you solve the customer's problem. So we have this phrase called AI at the core and AI at the edge. And the best way to think about it is that with AI at the edge, you're probably still using

Starting point is 00:40:51 software as you always have. The bits and vice that you wrote before still are there. You're instead inserting LLMs or AI at different intersections or connection points. Okay. AI at the core means fundamentally looking at the problem space and the workflows and using AI to solve the problem, not just sprinkling it at the intersections of, you know, goos or user interfaces that are out there or using it to just accelerate things. So the way we talk about it is that companies where their code base remain, and they are attaching AI to it, often aren't the ones who are going to revolutionize their industry. Companies for whom their code base perhaps shrinks

Starting point is 00:41:48 and the LLM becomes a core part of what it is that they use to solve the problem are companies that actually are doing it right. Another characteristic is specificity. We've seen a lot of companies, companies want to do so many things and expect LLMs to be as broad as the problem sets they want to solve for. And we, in our experience, have seen that. To do that, you actually will need to have specialized first and then create a layer of a connective tissue that can offer intelligence. So we've seen companies instead just stay on top, try to build this massive solution set or LLM that can do it all.

Starting point is 00:42:41 But the successful ones that we've consulted with, partnered with, are talking to, are those who instead have seen, you know what? I can find, I can build with this team that I have on here can actually build this very specific solution set. This other team can do this. And then my job is to tie it all together with a broader multi model solution. and create an offering for the customer. I think those are two core things. I'm sure Oji can remember a few others. No, I think, no, I love, I was humble listening to you.

Starting point is 00:43:18 No, so maybe I'll embellish the point. We're seeing companies that are starting from a blank slate, taking an old problem, a sharp problem, and saying if we built it today with LLM as the core capability, as a core sort of blob of code, how would it look? And often these people are finding a lot of acceleration and they're actually like taking on adjacencies. So in a formless type form, you know,

Starting point is 00:43:54 a new product built by David O'Kunev and, you know, and a small group of people, We built a new type form, and we ended up building more than it because it also became like a sales lead agent. So like it did pre-sales, which ordinarily type form gets you into qualification before you talk to a salesperson, but the product itself did pre-sales. So that capability was so strong. We're also seeing the shrinking thing. It's funny. In the last week, I've seen companies that have been around for five years who, once LLMs came, they just reimagine. into their product.

Starting point is 00:44:33 Like clay. com is a six-year-old company, super successful. So in the first category, things like lovable, but in the second category of people who are like, okay, we're going to rethink this

Starting point is 00:44:43 and we're going to do it. Now, the problem for the rest of the industry is this, you know, the elevator's dilemma. They have lots of revenue tied to old code bases. And so their job is to, you know,

Starting point is 00:44:57 we tell PM leaders all the time, is to navigate how you use LLMs on the old thing, but navigate to the new thing, before someone eats your lunch. And it's complicated, it's hard, but you have to do it. Now, let me submit maybe a couple of smaller things. The people who are succeeding are taking chances on user experiences. We don't believe the chat interface is the final boss for AI user experience. We think that there's a reason viewers exist and the command line didn't work.

Starting point is 00:45:28 Otherwise, DOS will be the biggest operating system. and so people have to do different things and be dynamic. One of the big things is dynamic user experiences that just personalize to the customer. So we'll see a lot of, we see a lot of people succeeding there. And one of the things that we don't see people doing,

Starting point is 00:45:47 actually, that we want people to do with something that's even mentioned, which is ethics. You know, like, we think of AI and its core capabilities as ordinance level, meaning like, at some point, we'll think of this more powerful than the fusion bomb.

Starting point is 00:46:05 And we have a bunch of software people who have no consideration of ethics play with this stuff all the time. And so one thing we'd like to see the best companies do is lead on that. Think about the responsibility we have to the human race when we build new digital products that will give them superpowers.

Starting point is 00:46:24 I want to zoom out even further. So we started talking about individual people, skills, what's going to be most important. We've been talking just now about what companies are doing well, the ones that are succeeding in this crazy new world of AI. I want to now zoom out just your entire product career. I'm curious just when you look back at the 50 plus years of combined experience, you have what are some of the biggest product lessons that have you've learned that you would love to share that you think people can avoid having to learn the hard way? I think what I want to reiterate the thing that we talked about, sharp problems,

Starting point is 00:47:03 the problem you focus on is probably the most predictive of your success. Pick a sharp problem. Pick something that if you really solve it, people will come. You know, watching Jeff Bezos from the 80s feels prescient. He's like, look, people always shop, I'm going to be the guy. And he did it. So do that. And I say this humbly because I've failed.

Starting point is 00:47:28 Because sometimes we build things that we are passionate about, but being a founder is not an exercise. And even an operator in a company, it's not an exercise in your passion and your brilliance. It's an exercise in finding what the market needs. So do that. Be disciplined and doing that. We also talk about simplicity a lot. Even this morning, I was talking to a designer and he had a convoluted user experience. And I said, only 20% of people who come to this will see that.

Starting point is 00:47:57 And so the point of design is first simplicity and clarity before we get fancy. And so there's a lot. Steve Jobs embodied this earlier on. I think iOS has become complicated. But like start with simplicity and simple is hard. And in 2025, we're designing for distracted brains. A couple of things are happening. People are super distracted. People are no longer wow by technology.

Starting point is 00:48:26 call it AI all you want. They just assume that it is what it is. And so simplicity is really good for 20, 25 and beyond, basically. And then, you know, we talk a lot about fundamentals. I'm going to throw this to it in there. Like, there are ways to figure out the fundamentals. What we do, I know we operate in the software layer, but it's most basic.

Starting point is 00:48:51 We're trying to predict what humans would do, what they will want, how their workflow will go. And there's some, you know, there's a layer of that that is quite similar, you know, because our friends, the anthropologists and the psychologists really understand this. And I think if we understand it, we can build better software. So, but isn't I want to let you, I'm just going to throw this up to you so I don't take up all the space. Go for it. No, I think you're on to something about just.

Starting point is 00:49:22 So when I think about the hard. lessons I've learned. You talked about simplicity. And I'm saying this also from humility and just having learned a lot from past failures. One of the reasons people create complicated solutions is because they are afraid to take a stab, to put their point of view up there. Opinionated. They're not opinionated. Right? They're not opinionated enough. And that often comes from, not having high conviction because you're not sure that you spend the time with the customer. So with that, I know it sounds trite, but spend time and understand the customer or borrow from others who do.

Starting point is 00:50:10 You've got to not just lay it all out and have them choose which way, because it is so effing confusing. 10,000 options because you can't pick one. Yeah. The experience is so murky, chalky. nobody knows what the hell to do because you can't make a decision. Make it simple, come up, come up with an opinion and put your opinion out there. You can change. Leave the configurations and the options behind. But leave them behind the sense if you must. But try and create the most

Starting point is 00:50:43 compelling, the simplest experience and you will actually have better adoption. You're better of doing that and being wrong. Many times we leave and ship convoluted experiences because we don't have the courage, number one, to make a decision, create a point of view and ship it out there. The reality is, and my experience has shown that you're better off picking an opinion, shipping it out there, being wrong and then adjusting. That leaving too many options because you then can never learn what was the better experience overall. So that's one thing. The other major lesson I've learned is actually one about strategy. It is that the best way to go from strategy to execution in a way that activates the entire organization is communication.

Starting point is 00:51:41 You will never, never spend too much time communicating the why to your organization over and over and over. again. I don't remember what movie it was. I think it was, the movie about sending someone to the moon, right? I'm forgetting what it is. But the idea that everybody in NASA knew that we were working to send a man to the moon, even the janitor did, knew that. So that idea of ensuring that everybody in a team understands the why behind what we're doing and can speak to it. I saw something on LinkedIn the other day, I think it was Martin Erickson who actually posted this. It talked about how the same way

Starting point is 00:52:30 we talk about crossing the chasm and figuring out who it is that will adopt a product, we should think about the change management required for strategy communication through that lens. There will be early adopters. Think about those people.

Starting point is 00:52:46 Those people will hear the message, the strategy. And by the time others are just beginning to understand what it is. They're probably on the next version of the strategy asking what can change, what should change. And that was so clarifying for me because I always wondered why strategy could get muddy sometimes is because when you look at your entire population, about 5% are going to be the early adopters. They get it. They buy into it and they're moving. Four months later, they're onto something, wondering what the next version of the strategy will look like. How do we build on top of this?

Starting point is 00:53:18 At that same time, some people are just beginning to get it. And honestly, that answered a lot of questions for me as to how it is that you can be working on a strategy. Some people get it, can recite it, tell you why we're doing what we're doing, while some PMs are still struggling with, but why? How come? Can we do this? Because they are in stock laggards out there.

Starting point is 00:53:41 So that idea of trying to really activate a strategy into pure execution, if you think about communication as a critical element and then also look at it as how many people, what is the crossing the chasm version? Who is at what point in this change management journey? I think that is actually, that was one of the major lessons I've learned as a leader in product. I love these sorts of conversations where you, to spend 50 years learning and then you just tell us, here's all the answers, here's a bunch of stuff that'll save you a bunch of pain and suffering. Let me try to summarize what you shared and tell me what I missed. So some of the biggest things you two have learned over the past 50 years and all, it's not in the right order, but communicating the why making, you can never spend too much time helping people understand why what you're working on is important.

Starting point is 00:54:30 And then there's just the change management component of not underestimating the work that it'll take to convince people to adopt something. And then this whole idea of crossing the chasm, we had Jeffrey Moore on the podcast. So we'll point to that if you want to deeply understand what that's all about. then this lesson of simplicity, just keep per just the value of keeping things simple, easier said than done, and having an opinion, having the courage almost to do something really simple, not give people all the options. And then this, uh, Aji meant you talked about the idea of most times when something fails, it's the wrong, you're going after the wrong problem. It's not sharp enough or it's just not solving people, something people actually care about. And then just talking to customers, uh, always easy to say.

Starting point is 00:55:13 most people don't actually do it enough. I want to add one more thing, and I'll be brief. This is more about people's careers, like PMs. In our career, we have, you know, we started out as engineers, basically, became mainline PMs, got an MBA, became, you know, worked harder, became executives and so on and so forth. So some, you know, people look at my careers in this career, and they're like, oh, this is amazing. What behind that is a lot of intention. We always held in our brains what do we want to do next?

Starting point is 00:55:51 Like what is the next step? What is the hunger that drives us? And there's nothing more powerful than intention than like imagination. It's like a little bit of cheese in front of the mouse like it chases after. being able to visualize and chase the thing that you see about where you want to be is so powerful. I talked to a guy who gave me a break. So when I was, you know, the last two years of my time at Microsoft, I switched to become a marketing lead. Because I was a little time of PM at Microsoft specifically, and I was getting an MBA.

Starting point is 00:56:32 And I talked to Dave Mendlin. He was a vice president, you know, or senior director. I worked eventually for Satya. And he gave me a break and became a product market over a couple of years. He came back and talked to me this year and he said, Oji, everything you told me you wanted to do

Starting point is 00:56:52 from afar, I saw that you have done. And you told me about them 10 years ago. And I didn't even know that. And so it's a very powerful thing. I think that this is not just about how to build better products, but how to manage your own career is super important.

Starting point is 00:57:07 I just went to a talk, a storytelling event, and there was a very similar theme. This guy just always wanted to be a stand comedian. And the lesson he learned is just you need to, the best motivator is desire. Having that desire not fade because that'll, it's kind of like going back to our idea of the project. Having a project to work on because you need a problem solved is a really good way to just get to where you want to go. Yeah. Asinae, I think you had something else you wanted to add. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:57:36 You know, you said this thing about, you know, know the customer, know the customer. And I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of noise out there about customer interviews, et cetera, right? But I do want to remind people that there's a difference between what the customer says, right? Customer discovery, asking them things, right? And AI is really good at that right now. Like you can help you get all the transcriptions. But just remember that what they do is actually more important. So earlier in my career, I had the opportunity to have a UX lab that I worked in.

Starting point is 00:58:11 And ethnographic research, watching what people truly were doing still is top-notch. It's the best thing you can ever do. So what does that look like digitally? It's still the core instrumentation, figuring out how people finish things. But also, true customer insight comes from not using a, to read all the transcripts of your customer interviews. That isn't what it is. It's actually trying to figure how to best walk in their shoes.

Starting point is 00:58:41 And whatever it takes, you've got to figure how to do that. Because it's not what they say they do. It's not what they say they want. That's not the true intimacy you want with a customer. You actually want to observe them as much as possible and understand the why behind the actions they're taking. And I think that's a really important thing to point out right now because I think people are cheating with AI through interviews, et cetera,

Starting point is 00:59:05 and thinking that they're going to figure it out. But there's a different type of insight that comes from what I call true ethnographic research, studying, observing, understanding the driver behind their problem or the need that they're trying to solve. And I just want to make sure we say that because I think people think AI has come to save it all. But no, it's going to give you junk because people don't always say what they mean or they don't realize that they're lying about their reasons for doing a thing. I think some of these lessons, especially the last one, is the kind of lesson that you can hear it and be like, yeah, yeah, I get it.

Starting point is 00:59:39 And then you have to actually learn it and find the times. Oh, wow, okay, everyone told me they wanted this thing and nobody actually used it. Okay, I remember as I said that on a podcast. Oh, I get it now. And so I think, you know, there's only so much we can do to help people learn these things. Sometimes you just have to fail. Excairience. pain to learn. Okay, is there anything that we have not touched on, anything that you wanted to share

Starting point is 01:00:04 before we get to our very exciting lightning round? I think we didn't talk about ethics and as, you know, people of color and parents, I think that having a call for our PMs to really be thoughtful about what it is their building and what it is they're integrating into their product is really important to us. We just want to call to call. call PMs that this awesome power we have to direct lots of developers conjured responsibility or the spider van trope and um you know we created social media i worked at twitter and i always like oh my god like how many mistakes we make like i remember the person who invented deep fakes was interviewed one time and she said and they're like what are the implications of your stuff and she's like

Starting point is 01:00:51 i don't care i was so shocked i was like what software engineer you don't care you don't care She's like, oh, it's all invented countermeasure. I'm like, oh, my God. So PMs, we shouldn't be like that. We shouldn't be like that. I guess the one thing I also wanted to say is like one pinpoint we hear a lot is strategy. PMs who are like senior PM principal, PM worry about, oh my God, how can I do product strategy? And in the book, we talk a lot about the sources of strategy.

Starting point is 01:01:20 And it's not mysterious. I think there are things you need to learn about like the sources of competitive abandon. and even what that means, like, you know, intellectual property or, like, economies of scale, economies of scope. Because there's no formal education about this stuff, PMs don't have the fundamentals they need because, you know, it's easy to learn customer discovery, but, like, learning the seven levers of competitive advantage, maybe you've never seen, or learning the 10 ways that companies can grow, which is not just product, sometimes there's distribution or somebody

Starting point is 01:01:52 the superior business strategy. And these are ideas that if PMs, had good material, sort of like packed in the middle of business school, you can actually become a person who helps direct your company on where to go and do it in such a way that's so compelling

Starting point is 01:02:09 you can talk about it that, you know, it's good for your career. I remember, Lenny, I think one time I saw, a long time ago, I saw something you're written around, how do you make money? You know, you sell a thing, you rent a thing, you know, there, there are many people think that it's, there

Starting point is 01:02:25 are many, many, like, it's this amorphous thing, but you may not have the truly exhaustive list, right? But there are a fixed number of things that you can know to create strategy, to make money, and just doing the work or doing the research to figure, okay, hey, how does one make money? How does one get competitive advantage? In the book, we wrote about 10 growth levers and several levels of competitive advantage. And I think if you master that, you have like 80% of a tool set that makes you a compelling director or CPO that can play at that level.

Starting point is 01:03:02 And it's super important. Otherwise, you're sort of guessing. You're like, oh, did this deck work for my CEO? No, that's not what you should think about it. I'll point to the post that you're mentioning, as you know, that is all the ways to make money. But let's use this opportunity to talk about your book, just what people would get out of it, why they should buy it,

Starting point is 01:03:19 do the pitch, and then we'll get to the very exciting lighting around. In our career, 50 plus years, when we started this product management thing, we thought, oh, this is going to be mainstream. There's development. There are 30 million developers, whatever. And it was going to be product managers all over the world. But operating in the U.S., operating in Europe, in Africa,

Starting point is 01:03:42 it turns out the best PM, this is ghettoed somewhere in the West Coast of the United States. Right? We know this. And we don't like that at all, right? We think of Pochaea should be everywhere. So we wrote Building Rocket. ships to help people figure out how to build not only great products, but the companies that build great products to make sure that people have the knowledge not to be one-hit

Starting point is 01:04:05 wonders. And the book is divided into two. One is the fundamentals. If you're a senior to principal, P and the fundamentals of building a great product, right, all the way from simplicity to even pricing. And then the second part is how do you lead a high-performing shipyard? And how do you go from motivating people to charting the course for the future, depending on the way you're in the market, to make, you know, like isn't I said,

Starting point is 01:04:36 to commanding a shipyard that is kickass. That's the book. And, you know, in the latter part we also talk about, like, what's going to happen in terms of AI over the next few years. So we are, it's called building rocket ships. very proud of it. It's right over here. And we think it's awesome because it represents a lot of of the experience that we've had over these years and load of success. And where do folks find it if they want to go check it out? Maybe you can buy one or two or ten or hundred. Some companies

Starting point is 01:05:09 are being buying a lot actually in bulk. So this is a note for the companies. But you can buy it on Amazon. You can find it on Shopify. On Shopify, if you go for it, there's an additional Pro Edition. The Pro Edition is like a team product. The book is on Coda. 0.io and you can share it with your team. You can take notes. There's almost double the amount of content

Starting point is 01:05:32 because it contains checklists, templates, tools for PMs that they can download and just use immediately. It's almost like code for you, for your PM career. We have the book and then we have

Starting point is 01:05:48 the Coda version. and one of the things we really worked on was making it actionable. So the minute you, if you get the code of version, you can read a chapter and then you'll have templates, frameworks, step checklist, whatever it is that we felt made sense.

Starting point is 01:06:07 We made that available via the coded version. What a mother load of value. People always have an issue saying the URL on podcast. I just want to make sure what's that. How do you actually find this version? You said it's on Shopify, but there's probably a domain name to get there. So if you go to www.com.com.com.com.com. BRPro, you can buy the Pro Edition.

Starting point is 01:06:33 And if you've bought it, you can also use it to log into the Coda Edition. And you're off to the races. There we go. Amazing. We'll also link to it in the show notes. And with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you, too. Are you ready?

Starting point is 01:06:50 Yes. First question is what are two or three books you find yourself recommending most to other people? We just did one. Building rocket chips is the first one. So we're not afraid to self-promote. But also the other one for me is to build Tony Fidel. I run into Tony in Nigeria building an accelerator and he was just incredible books. I totally recommend him.

Starting point is 01:07:13 One for me and it's both for work and life, et cetera, is this one called the Let Them Theory. I think it was Mel Robbins. I love it. I just think that many times PMs are control freaks or a type and being able to leave people to their own devices sometimes is hard. So let them remind us that we get a lot more rest for ourselves when we let people be. I was just listening to that book on audio. I was like, it's sitting at the top of the bestseller like every freaking week. What is this book? and it's so good. I sat on your background actually. I noticed that you're reading. Yeah, it's so good. It's such a simple idea. And the thing I learned I'm listening to it is there's a second part to it. It isn't just let them. I don't know. Let them. Let them. Let them. Yeah, exactly. Such a guy. I've been using it. It's really powerful. I get what I didn't. I mean, the book is good. Yeah. Let's give for credit. But it's such a simple thing that other people in many religions, et cetera, have used. But she grounds, she grounds. She makes, she shows you. She shows you. She shows you. why it's necessary and how we show up trying to control others in other situations that are very common to most people. So I like that. I never thought of it in the PM context. That is very cool. And this is by Mel Robinson, by the way. Okay. Next question. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed? So we watched a few shows together recently.

Starting point is 01:08:38 So I would say one that we loved and we couldn't, we kept saying, gosh, we can't wait for our kids to be old enough to watch. It was one called forever. it's it was just really really good um it's uh it's a love story it's uh one of these it was a book we imagined um done from an african-american point of view it's just really well done so that's a tv show is called forever and another one that we really like because i think it was sterling k brown is paradise really enjoyed it it was interesting it kept us excellent it kept us uh yeah What about you? What about you?

Starting point is 01:09:18 The man is in a row. And the movie that we've been geeking out on is sinners. We just love sinners. I think I saw it twice. My son saw it like three or four times. We're just big fans of Kugler and where he tells stories. So we love that. I've seen both those two recently and they're both a very unexpected,

Starting point is 01:09:38 they've been unexpected directions. I'm like, why didn't I see this coming? Yes. Yes. Oh, man. Yeah, that movie is beautiful sinners. I was like, wow. But I really hate scary movies.

Starting point is 01:09:48 I enjoyed that one. Someone else recently mentioned that movie too, actually, on the podcast. Next question. Do you use their favorite product you recently discover that you really love? Could be a gadget, could be clothes, could be a kitchen device, could be an app. I'll start me. I love Claude. It's like Audrey says, it's my psychic.

Starting point is 01:10:03 I use it for anything and everything. But, you know, obviously the thing you learn is don't, even though you keep talking about it as generative AI, be the generator and let it refine. That's a major trick. You know, that's the hack. Everybody should learn. Super hack. Don't generate.

Starting point is 01:10:19 Generate first. Generate. And let it help you. Otherwise, you're going to get bullshit. I'm sorry. That's really good tip. And one, I'll say I have this new espresso machine, the virtual, that all you got from me. Everybody is using it now.

Starting point is 01:10:33 And I'm kind of pissed because, but it's still my favorite product. But everybody's in it, you know, the reason that is, I normally like keeping it really clean and shiny. Now that everybody's using it, it's not as clean and shiny. as it used to be. When she says everybody, she means everyone else in the house. She wants to use it by herself. Yeah,

Starting point is 01:10:50 she needs a second version just for herself. Yeah, we need another one. And then the plebs and the pleratoric can use the other ones. That's right. When they're good. When they're going to make all my lattes, heart cold,

Starting point is 01:11:03 all of that. So I love it. Ajie, what about you? I just like using like these new air tools that have improved my life. Like gamma is good. Framer is also good. I'm getting to lovable,

Starting point is 01:11:14 because I sort of like, say using the hardcore stuff, and so using lovable felt like a little step down it a little bit, but like Olamma, LM Studio, these are ways that I used to do my hobby of improving the house. But also, I'm super into local models, these open source models running them because I feel like I can put them in different places. So LM Studio and Olamas are just favorite things. So yeah, those are some of the things

Starting point is 01:11:45 of viving on. Gamma and Loveable get a year free by becoming a paid subscriber of my newsletter. We'll link to that. Little did you know. I heard about Loveable. I didn't know about Gamma. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:11:57 And then maybe Framers someday. There's a luck one on there. Check it out. Lenny's newsletter.com, click ProductPass. Okay. Two more questions. Is their favorite life motto that you two find really useful

Starting point is 01:12:08 and come back to in work or in life? So I'll say two. And one has been from childhood. My mother had a little plaque in our house that said anything worth doing is worth doing well. And it's so funny, I just, I assume that that's how everybody lives, but I realize now that it isn't. So I come back to that all the time. And then, so I'll say that came from my mother. But the one I think I've adopted and probably just general upbringing is this thing that anywhere you are make better.

Starting point is 01:12:41 So it's like by being there, I've made it better. And it's simple things like you walk into a bathroom. It's nasty. Try and clean up if you can't. It's that simple. Beautiful. But it's something I live with and I live by. Adi, what you got?

Starting point is 01:13:03 You know, I mentioned one already, which is whenever you wake up is your morning. So like I try to spend. I try to spend very little time looking backwards, except to mind the lessons of it, and then just move forward, because the universe and the forward motion is infinite. And so it's an evil proverb, Oghai, Tata, we'll talk togi. So I want to say that.

Starting point is 01:13:26 Well, the other thing I think I learned from my dad is just like learn all the time what doesn't mean that you should be not confident. is this idea that there's more knowledge outside your brain than inside it. And that doesn't mean you should be in a crouch. In fact, you should be proud of being called stupid for a second because we're all stupid at something, right, in the sense that we don't know. There's so many things we don't know because we're finite.

Starting point is 01:13:57 But do that and still be confident. So you can learn what still have a sense of self on what you've accomplished. And so I try to live by that every day. I love that you each had two and they're both so wonderful. Unfortunately, final question, something that I like to do with duo guests. I switch between two types of questions. So I'm going to ask you this one. What's something you love about the other person?

Starting point is 01:14:23 I love that Uji lives in the future. And obviously I get the benefit of this. We get to plan. He's very intentional about the future. And it just makes us move together with intention for as partners in life, as well as even with our company. I think that is something I really appreciate about him. So sweet. So there are two things I love about is in there.

Starting point is 01:15:01 One is she is, I think she's very accepting, loving person. She's nice. Like when I introduce her, I say, look, you're going to talk to her and you're going to forget about me because she's 10 times nicer than I am. I'm not a horrible person, but she's just way nicer than I am. And so that's great. The second thing is something that people don't know about her is that she's a great problem solver. Right. Like she will, you'll throw something at her and be asymmetric thinking is incredible.

Starting point is 01:15:33 Right. But, you know, like, I didn't think of that. It happens to me all day. the time. So I love that too. As you and Aji, this was amazing. We covered so much ground. So many lessons learned over these past 50 years about life and work and PMing and all the things. Two final questions. Where can folks finding online if they want to reach out? And how can listeners be useful to you?

Starting point is 01:15:54 They can find us online at www.com.com.com.com. That's first. That's where we help founders and help companies build better products. they can find us on substack where we've published as product-bind I think those are the main places like we are starting to put content out in like YouTube or you know just experimenting with how to amplify our voice

Starting point is 01:16:21 but those are the two main places you can find us awesome and we'll link to all that stuff in the show notes and then yeah as any no same thing like our LinkedIn we always say my DMs are always open that's what I always tell people how work you can reach out to us. We're pretty responsive to most people.

Starting point is 01:16:39 But yeah, productmind.co is the best way to get a hold of us. How can be useful to us is like we are so inspired by what you've done with your community. And we're part of the few communities, but we are very interested in partnering with more PMs. Shelley, our executive cohort, like we're having a hard time right now. like partnering with us, calling us, like we want to be able to distribute opportunity that we may not be interested in to PMs who are struggling right now. And sometimes it's not obvious where to pass opportunity that we're not interested in. So like I think useful to us is reach out. And there might be intersections that help you or help us.

Starting point is 01:17:25 So do it. Amazing. And that's through DMs on LinkedIn, ideally, or through your website. Yes, through our website or through Substack or just LinkedIn. All the places. Incredible. Thank you too so much for being here. Such a pleasure.

Starting point is 01:17:39 Thank you, Lenny. We just, like, what you're doing for our community is incredible, so hats off. I appreciate it. Yeah, hats off. Good to see the progress over the year. So, yeah, well done. Thank you. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:17:52 You too. Okay. Bye, everyone. Bye. 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.

Starting point is 01:18:11 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - How AI is reshaping the product role | Oji and Ezinne Udezue

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